I am not going to be super intense about condemning those who punch actual Nazis… but I still believe it is impossible to know where someone is in their radicalization. Even if we know someone is indeed a Nazi, if we punch the person who is vacillating or unsure or there because he doesn’t see a way out, we’re making it harder for that person to leave.
I don’t want to make that harder. I may not be able to safely protect that person, but I want to live my life in such a way that I model “there is life after extremism,” not “if you are an extremist, you are already dead to me.”
“I
would want to punch a Nazi in the nose, too,” Maria Stephan, a program director
at the United States Institute of Peace, told me. “But there’s a difference
between a therapeutic and strategic response.”
The
problem, she said, is that violence is simply bad strategy.
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.
It also probably helps them recruit.
And more
broadly, if violence against minorities is what you find repugnant in neo-Nazi
rhetoric, then “you are using the very force you’re trying to overcome,”
Michael Nagler, the founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at the
University of California, Berkeley, told me.
Most
important perhaps, violence is just not as effective as nonviolence.
In their
2011 book, “Why Civil Resistance Works,” Dr. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth
examined how struggles are won. They found that in over 320 conflicts between
1900 and 2006, nonviolent resistance was more than twice as effective as
violent resistance in achieving change.
And nonviolent struggles were resolved
much sooner than violent ones.
The
main reason, Dr. Stephan explained to me, was that nonviolent struggles
attracted more allies more quickly.
Violent struggles, on the other hand, often
repelled people and dragged on for years.
Their
findings highlight what we probably already intuit about protest: It’s a
performance not just for the people you may be protesting against but also for
everyone else who may be persuaded to join your side.
Take
the American civil rights movement. Part of what moved the country toward the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 were the images, broadcast to the entire country, of
steadfastly nonviolent protesters, including women and occasionally children,
being beaten, hosed and abused by white policemen and mobs.
Those
images also highlight two points emphasized by Stephanie Van Hook, the
executive director of the Metta Center for Nonviolence.
First, nonviolence is a
discipline, and as with any discipline, you need to practice to master it.
Nonviolence training was a fixture of the movement. Even the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. and his companions rehearsed in basements, role playing and
insulting one another to prepare for what was to come.
And
second, sometimes being on the receiving end of violence is the whole point.
That’s how you expose the hypocrisy and rot you’re struggling against. They
attack unprovoked. You don’t counterattack. You’re hurt. The world sees. Hearts
change.
It takes tremendous courage: Your body ends up being the canvas that
bears the evidence of the violence you’re fighting against. But
ideally, of course, we’d avoid violence altogether. This is where the sort of
planning on display at Wunsiedel is key. Humor is a particularly powerful tool
— to avoid escalation, to highlight the absurdity of absurd positions and to
deflate the puffery that, to the weak-minded at any rate, might resemble heroic
purpose. […]”
I can’t elaborate much cause mobile, but yes, being non-violent isn’t about being nice to nazis, it’s about strategy. Violence can be used as a strategy but it needs a lot of specific contextual elements to work. Punching nazis at random in the street might feel good, but it’s not gonna be effective in the macro sense of stopping nazis from nazying around.
In my own country, armed rebellion forced diplomatic talks that gave us the Republic of Ireland. But the IRA bombings never gave us back the North. There are reasons why violence worked in 1921 but not in the 1970-80s onwards which is when you have more peaceful strategies working better than violent ones. The context changed. Don’t ask me for the specifics, I’m not enough of an expert, but the results are clear. If we ever get the North back now, it will be via a referendum and because there is a popular majority for it that has gained enough of a political voice and enough economic power to make the choice. It will not be because randos started punching Brits in the street.
I’m not condemning people who punch nazis. I’m sure it feels good if you can throw a punch (I’m more likely to break my hand, so I’ll leave that to other people). I’m sure there are contexts in which it works for minor goals (like that German who beat up an American who did a nazi salute sure achieved his goal of making him stop offending the people present). But it’s not a viable macro strategy. For that you need the pacifists working on getting confederate statues taken down, protecting people’s voting rights, and organising peaceful marches to make their voice louder than nazis as demonstrated in Boston, working to get Trump voted out of office in 2020 or have the republican majority voted down in 2018, working to get Trump impeached, to make him accountable for his words on national media, working on that program that help people leave the white supremacists, and a thousand other crucial things.
Yes. This. If you want me to join your violent movement (and I’m not entirely sure why, given the physical disability I have), show me thT you have plans. That they’re good plans. That you’ve at least given thought to how you’re going to minimize loss of life… and how you’re going to use it to your advantage if massive loss of life happens anyway.
If your plans don’t look good to me, I’m not joining even without moral concerns, honey.
Each generation is promised more than it will get: which creates, in each generation, a furious, bewildered rage, the rage of people who cannot find solid ground beneath their feet.
The way in which anti-semitism is distinguished, and should be distinguished, from racism, has to do with the sort of imaginary of power, attributed to the Jews, Zionism, and Israel, which is at the heart of anti-semitism. The Jews are seen as constituting an immensely powerful, abstract, intangible global form of power that dominates the world. There is nothing similar to this idea at the heart of other forms of racism. Racism rarely, to the best of my knowledge, constitutes a whole system that seeks to explain the world. anti-semitism is a primitive critique of the world, of capitalist modernity. The reason I regard it as being particularly dangerous for the left is precisely because anti-semitism has a pseudo-emancipatory dimension that other forms of racism rarely have.
I hope that you no longer feel bad; learning not to hurt people is good, but being chased by horrible guilt is not.
I would add that people make mistakes while they’re learning. (I mean, all the time, but particularly while they’re learning.) If you make a mistake, learn better, and don’t make that mistake again, that is exactly how learning is supposed to work. You don’t have to feel bad about doing something wrong out of genuine ignorance.
If there’s any way to make repairation, that’s usually what guilt’s for. If you can’t make it up to the person wronged, you could take a symbolic action by say donating some to a relavent charity, and keep up direct action by watching for it in real life, deescaliting the situation when you see it occurring, and trying to patiently help the wrong learn right when you see it.
Happy birthday to American engineer Ray McIntire, born on August 24, 1918! A research engineer at the Dow Chemical Company, McIntire invented
foam polystyrene, better known by its brand name, Styrofoam. And what better way to celebrate McIntire’s birthday than with a selection of photos featuring objects made from Styrofoam? (Fun tidbit: that’s Ray McIntire himself in the first photo, posing with the foam Santa Claus!).
For more information on the history of Styrofoam, check out this Othmeralia post from May 2016.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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