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Political violence has never been entirely unacceptable in the US. The country was born and bred in violence, slavery and genocide. Descended upon and torn apar
by krapp 1y ago
Political violence has never been entirely unacceptable in the US. The country was born and bred in violence, slavery and genocide. Descended upon and torn apart by European colonizers with the rabid ferocity of hyenas. America, perhaps alone, defines a free state by its capacity for political violence. Americans have romanticized political violence as an ideal for centuries in the archetype of the armed rural patriot, the New World version of ancient Rome's yeoman farmer, waxing romantic about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants. The US has blood soaked into its floorboards.
Political violence against fascists has only become morally questionable as fascism has become normalized. The article is correct that political violence is extremely bad, but it has also always been acceptable (or at least easy to culturally compartmentalize) against certain groups. That is the norm, not some idealized abstract notion of politics entirely encapsulated within rhetoric and debate, which has only recently been broken by "the left." A country that burns crosses and shoots up synagogues and bombs abortion clinics, where the police and ICE kidnap and kill with impunity, that sends the military into its own cities to kill immigrants and harass political dissidents, that builds concentration camps for "enemy combatants" in undeclared wars, has no right to clutch its pearls over actual white supremacists and neo-nazis - unambiguous fascists - taking what they themselves would freely give.
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago> Political violence against fascists has only become morally questionable as fascism has become normalized. As fascism has become normalized, or as the term has? If you're going to label expedited restaurant registration as "fascism", then violence against fascism had better not be normalized.
- krapp 1y ago>As fascism has become normalized, or as the term has? Fascism. The normalization of the term has followed the normalization of the politics. >If you're going to label expedited restaurant registration as "fascism" I haven't done anything of the sort.
- AnimalMuppet 1y agoYou haven't done anything of the sort. Others have, as quoted in the article. If that's going to be labeled as fascism, then violence against fascism had better not be normalized, because for at least some people, everything they don't like is now labeled "fascism".
- krapp 1y agoOne person in the instance of the article called something fascism, and there was no violence. A slippery slope argument isn't effective if no one is actually slipping down the slope. Meanwhile the right has no problem calling for violence against "the left" or "socialists" or "communists" in the broadest terms possible - so broad they encompass every Democrat by default - and committing it far more often than bloviating progressives on social media. Because a lot of them are actually fascists. And violence against fascists has been normalized since the 1940s. We didn't defeat the Nazis with vigorous debate on the merits of the Jewish Question, we defeated them with bullets. Superman punched Nazis in the face. When the fascists stop being fascist we'll stop punching them in the face. That's the deal.