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How serious are you guys when you talk about punching nazis? (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have been seeing plenty of guillhotine and mollotov jokes here, and as the title says, punching nazis.

I've been reading a book about nonviolence and anarchism, and he basically shows how we shouldn't use violence, even in extreme cases (like neo nazis).

The main argument is that the means dictates the ends, so if we want a non violent (and non opressing) society, punching people won't help.

And if it is just a joke, you should probably know that some people have been jailed for decades because of jokes like these (see: avoiding the fbi, second chapter of the book above).

Obviously im up for debate, or else I wouldn't make this post. And yes, I do stand for nonviolence.

(english is not my first language, im sorry if I made errors, or wansn't clear.)

(if this is not pertinent, I can remake this post in c/politics or something)

(the book is The Anarchist Cookbook by Keith McHenry, if you are downloading from the internet, make sure you download it from the correct author, there is another book with the same name.)

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (7 children)

I'm just gonna focus entirely on the common misunderstanding of the use of violence against Nazis in WWII because that's such a common argument for punching nazis and it's really quite wrong on so many levels.

"But Nazis were stopped by violence in WWII." That's a meaningless statement without the missing last word. Violence stopped Nazis militarily, after they had already seized power in Germany and were invading other countries. Today we're not in a military battle with Nazis, we're in an ideological battle.

So why did the Nazis seize power in Germany? Because they weren't punched enough? Well the exact mechanism behind how the nazis seized power is a complex web of illegal political maneuvers, political violence, and yes, some degree of ideological success by the nazis. But a key part of that ideological success was the fear of political violence by their opponents - most notably the Reichstag fire - to justify the power that they were illegally taking. It was basically "desperate times require desperate measures". So in the ideological battle, the perceived* use of violence by Nazi opponents was actually a key part of their victory within Germany.

Meanwhile, over in the US, the contrast between the violence employed by the German American Bund (the US version of the Nazi party) and largely Jewish peaceful protesters ended up being a massive embarrassment to the Bund from which they never recovered. Again, ideologically, non-violence proved quite effective.

Point being, and this should be obvious - violence is a really bad option for succeeding in an ideological battle. Yes, in a military battle, it's the only rational option. But in an ideological battle, it's actually counterproductive.

*Obligatory caveat that whether the Reichstag fire was actually set by nazi opponents remains debated, but suffice to say the political atmosphere at the time made it plausible.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Maybe if we just don't fight the Nazis, they won't be able to justify violence against us 🤡

Yeah let's just allow roving gangs of brownshirts to run around attacking and terrorizing minorities because if we don't they might stage an attack and the "atmosphere of violence" we've created by trying to keep people safe will allow them to blame it on us and seize power. The solution is to just allow them to seize power directly through force, without resistance.

This is nonsense. Nazis don't need a justification to use force against you, they can literally just lie and make shit up, like they did with the Reichstag Fire. It doesn't matter if it's true because it's directed at the weakest and most vulnerable and stigmatized populations, who have the least capacity to fight back and the fewest platforms to counter their narratives, and once they're done with them they work their way up. They will create terror on the streets and then use the fact that the streets are full of terror to seize power. People are going to try to defend themselves when attacked whether you think they should or not, so the only question is whether that resistance is strong enough to actually work.

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