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When an Antifa member punches someone who they identify as a white nationalist, at best they can make them shut up for a while. At worst the violence is recipro

• reducesuffering 9y ago
  Can’t upvote enough. Antifa make themselves much more like their opposition than they think by resorting to violence. It’s a whole lot more fun to think of yourself on this grandoise crusade-battle. The irony.
  • Avshalom 9y ago
    Shooting, shooting, Nazis is one of the things that Americans spent 60 years lionizing, bragging about, celebrating, etc. How did punching a Nazi once in a while stop being great?
    • Spivak 9y ago
      * Because we're not in a theater of war and they're not enemy combatants. * Because we're no better than them if we inflict wanton violence on people we would rather not have around. * Because it's taking the bait. The whole point in kindling all this anger is bring out the worst in everyone and show the world 'the intolerant left' and stupid 'punch a Nazi' bullshit only proves their point. The more these people are silenced, attacked and marginalized by 'leftists' in power the more they're able to show just how much power 'the left' wields. The more you fight them the stronger they get.
      • jackmott 9y ago
        being tolerant of Nazis is absurd.
        • harpiaharpyja 9y ago
          Yet they are also people too, regardless of how disgusting their beliefs. Edit: I should've probably known better than to reply to an obvious straw man. Arguing that responding to nazis with violence isn't necessarily the best thing is hardly advocating "tolerance"
        • abiox 9y ago
          i suppose it helps that nazi party was abolished in 1945...
    • skybrian 9y ago
      Maybe when bar fights went out of style? For many of us, all fighting is bad, other than in the military or maybe a boxing ring. I wonder how much of this debate about "punching a Nazi" boils down to attitudes about fighting in general? Here's a interesting essay about the reality of bar fights: http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/2014/01/21/lessons-from-bar-fight-litigation/ http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/2014/01/21/lessons-from-bar-fi...
    • abiox 9y ago
      this is equivocation. nazis were a german political group. they were a member of the axis forces which fought and lost against the allied forces in ww2. that group doesn't exist anymore. so-called "nazis" that people refer to today are largely just people subjected to lazy labeling.
      • Avshalom 9y ago
        "subjected to"? They're the ones calling themselves Nazis. We're if anything humoring them.
        • abiox 9y ago
          who is 'they'? i can imagine that there is a nonzero number of people who might label themselves that way, but for any given label you can probably find at least one person who might use it on themselves. what i mean is that 'nazi' is a term used to lazily and reductively describe a disparate swath of individuals. it's manner of use is as a thought-terminating cliche and cheap emotional appeal. perhaps ironically, thuggish violence against actual nazis in their nascent days (not to say they didn't engage in their own) drove some amount of public sympathy and attracted support. bad ideas need good ideas, not fists and yelling.
          • foldr 9y ago
            In the recent news, "Nazi" has been used primarily with reference to people who self-identify as Nazis.
            • abiox 9y ago
              and the vast majority of 'punched nazis' have not been nazis.
      • simonh 9y ago
        Would you say that someone who believes in the Communist Manifesto, is convinced by the arguments in Das Capital, who’s heroes are Lenin and Trotsky, joins a Union, tries to organise labour industrial action, writes articles for newspapers and magazines promoting communism, tries to persuade people of communist goals and values is not a communist because they are not a member of any particular formal communist party? I believe Trotsky died without being a member of a communist party. Was he not a communist? Was Goering not a Nazi when he died, and all the former members of the communist party stop being Nazis with the end of the war? I suppose that’s one way to look at it, but why do you think that approach is useful? What does it offer us that the more straightforward approach of judging people by their convictions, statements and actions does not?
    • ballenf 9y ago
      My grandfather suffered a lifetime of PTSD after having to shoot Nazis during WWII. I went to a few of his unit's reunions and have met a number of other veterans of that war. One thing I've never heard from a single one of them was bragging about shooting a Nazi. They suffered years and years of nightmares for having to shoot persons. They were looking through their guns sites and saw people -- young men who looked just like themselves or their brothers. Maybe there were some who came home and bragged, but to highlight those stories does an incredible disservice to the vast majority of the others. There were things they bragged about, but shooting humans wasn't a common reason for pride.
    • __s 9y ago
      My sister's grandfather was a Nazi soldier. He became a PoW, ending up a Canadian. Eventually married someone who had had to flee Germany. He didn't need to be shot, he'd been a kid put to serve his country Read some Vonnegut
      • simonh 9y ago
        Was he really a Nazi? He could be a German soldier in World War Two without being a Nazi, just as a Russian could have fought in WW2 against the Germans without being a Communist.
        • __s 9y ago
          Kind of the point. War paints a wide brush of the opposing side. Being a Nazi isn't a binary thing
        • int_19h 9y ago
          Indeed. But that goes to show that Americans weren't "shooting at Nazis" in WW2. They were shooting at German soldiers, because that's what you do in a war.
    • lin_lin 9y ago
      > How did punching a Nazi once in a while stop being great? Maybe when the people doing it reserve the right to decide who is a "Nazi" and who is not.
• Avshalom 9y ago
  Which puts all the onus on the "not a fucking Nazi" half (not actually half antifa is wildly outnumbered) of the equation while not holding the "fucking Nazi" half to any standards re: not murdering people. Contrarily this story starts out with the KKK member approaching and being civil to the black man.
  • drblast 9y ago
    Antifa and Nazis are both extreme fringe groups and not representative of a majority of society. It would behoove everyone to think about that when reading about them; both extremes receive an amount of attention disproportionate to their actual amount of influence. And by punching the Nazi, now it's a major news story with two "equal" sides instead of a footnote about a crazy dude in the subway.
    • yardie 9y ago
      Well neo-nazis believe that they are the alpha race and everyone else is subhuman/inferior. And who worships a regime that tried to exterminate quite a few of them. I’m not sure what the equal and opposite extreme to that is. This is like the equivocating 45 is currently doing by framing fascists and antifascists as opposite sides of the coin.
      • rpiguy 9y ago
        Antifa believe they are morally superior to everyone else and use it to justify violence and oppression, so it is a fairly appropriate comparison. I can easily see the movement turn to killing if left unchecked.
        • HillaryBriss 9y ago
          interesting to hear Antifa feel they are ethically superior to everyone else. my take has been that Antifa feel they are ethically superior to conservative/nazi/white supremacist/KKK demonstrators and that violence is the best policy. it seems to me that most special interest groups in the US feel they are ethically superior to others, but they do not feel that violence is an acceptable, much less the best policy.
• mschuster91 9y ago
  > at best they can make them shut up for a while. Let me fix this for you: "at best they can prevent the Nazi from threatening, punching or murdering members of minorities, while he's in hospital". Which is enough for me. The ultimate target of Nazis is to eliminate all non-white, non-Christian people, and every Nazi must be treated accordingly. The world already saw once what happens when you don't prevent Nazis at all costs, we don't need to repeat history. > If instead the Antifa would attempt to befriend that person and to have good faith dialogues with them, they would at least have the potential to actually reduce racism, and reduce hatred on both sides. This strategy only works on people not dragged into a fully closed world view composed of conspiracy theories (of the sort of "George Soros fabricated 9/11", Flat Earth and other stuff). Given the immense power of Facebook filter bubbles, where people end up with every post on their timeline being either fake news, propaganda or conspiracy crap, it's next to impossible to counter this. You can't counter 10 hours crap per day on Facebook with maybe a couple hours talking - it might have worked in the past, but no way today.
  • danmaz74 9y ago
    > The world already saw once what happens when you don't prevent Nazis at all costs, we don't need to repeat history. Did you know that during the rise of Hitler, there were almost daily violent clashes - many of them resulting in murders - between right wing and left wing extremists? It was not like the anti-Nazis wren't trying to "prevent nazis at all cost". But using street violence against street violence only serves to destroy rule of law, and whoever wins the violent clashes, democracy loses.
    • mschuster91 9y ago
      > But using street violence against street violence only serves to destroy rule of law Which rule of law? A state that outright finances and supports right-wing terrorists (e.g. NSU), actively looks away when Nazis are terrorizing entire neighborhoods while at the same time heavily repressing anti-fascist activity does not deserve to be called a state with a "rule of law". As for the street murders and street clashes, most of the time these were provoked by the SA marching and rioting through worker hoods (e.g. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA-Aufmarsch_in_Braunschweig https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA-Aufmarsch_in_Braunschweig).
• hkmurakami 9y ago
  This has been my position on the "check your privilege" rhetoric for many years now. I've rarely found people who share my perspective on this and I'm heartened to see this perspective shared here.
• 127 9y ago
  I do not want to see brown shirts patrolling the streets. Antifa is effectively creating them from thin air. >The name Sturmabteilung was first used in late 1921 when it was led by Captain Pfeiffer von Salomon. Because speaking in public was potentially a dangerous matter when politics was concerned, the original task of the SA was to protect Hitler as such events usually attracted the Communists and frequently ended in violence and disorder. This played into Hitler’s hands as many members of the SA were from the old German Army and knew how to cope during such incidents. When fights broke out the Weimar police appeared powerless and law and order was usually restored by the SA. This gave Hitler the lever he needed to claim that the Weimar regime lacked leadership and power while he was the one person who could restore Germany to law and order.