#really everyone’s already said what I’d probably say yk! but also I’m afraid to be wrong lol

[astrumocs]

I see y’all rbing the Sunne ask meme and I’m sending asks in spirit…

[korrasera]

I don’t really think it’s fair to label anyone who doesn’t thinks it’s tactically helpful to punch nazis fascist apologists. I used to agree with the whole punch nazis thing but I changed my mind. Not because I think nazis don’t deserve to get punched, but rather my focus is on the centrists and moderate right people who are historically the people who tend to fall into supporting fascists. 1/

The left already has an image problem in popular culture and I just think we need to avoid pushing people who are different from us away. I’d say that most people disagree with genocide but the alt-right and the fascists capitalize on the fact that some people are genuinely afraid of the left because they see us as violent and authoritarian. Is this true? To me, not in most cases and certainly not without cause. But that’s how they see us anyway. /2

But that’s how they see us anyway. I’m not saying punching nazis is bad, it’s probably the moral thing to do. But in terms of optics, I don’t think it does our cause good. It doesn’t matter how many nazis we punch if more and more people are radicalized to the far right. /3

The real fight for most of us is in how we present ourselves and our arguments to the world. Advocating for violence (however justified) gives centrists and our enemies the proof they want to say “look, they’re the same”. And yk what as a black, queer person who would 100% be a target to fascists I really resent the idea that me having this opinion makes me a fascist apologist because it doesn’t. I just take a different approach to how to solve a shitty situation. /4

I don’t quite agree with your position, but before I get into that, I want to start out by saying this:

I don’t label anyone who doesn’t agree with nazi punching as a ‘nazi apologist’, and can’t recall ever having seen anyone make that argument.

While it’s possible that at some point I said something that gave that impression, that’s not what I think and that’s not what I say when I talk about these topics.

To be clear:

When I’m criticizing centrists for reacting to violence against nazis, I’m not calling them nazi apologists, I’m criticizing them for having an not understanding moral philosophy, free speech, or what constitutes violence. And that usually ties into my larger point about how centrists are people who support the status quo not out of a reasoned choice but because they’re ignorant and afraid of bucking social norms.

When I’m criticizing nazi apologists, it’s for defending fascism, arguing that fascism doesn’t exist, or trying to spread fascism.

I wanted to put that out there first. I agree with you when you say that it’s not useful to label everyone as a nazi apologist when they don’t want to punch nazis. That’s why I don’t do it.

Everything else will be behind a cut because this is going to get quite long.

Also, when I’ve talked about this kind of thing in the past I’ve found that it’s really common to find that people willfully misinterpret the discussion. If I’m talking about how nazis are a thing again and exactly how bad that is, and someone replies to me to argue that I’m wrong and that nazis aren’t a threat and so on, if I reply to tell them that I disagree and provide supporting evidence that nazis are in fact back?

Well, I’ve lost track of how often people come back arguing like I just called them a nazi, a fascist, or a nazi apologist. And that says a lot about people who wade into conversations like this, that having their view contradicted makes them feel so defensive that they feel like the argument is about them specifically.

Now onto your points.

I don’t really agree with the basic assumptions you’re working from:

The left has an image problem in popular culture.

We need to avoid pushing people who are different from us away.

Violence against nazis validates the view of centrists and the enemies of the left.

In terms of optics, punching nazis doesn’t do our cause any good.

Punching nazis radicalizes people to the far right.

The thrust of your argument seems to be that we are contributing to the problem by punching nazis, whether by radicalizing people or by convincing them that leftists are terrible people. And I just don’t think that rings true.

The left always has an image problem. The left has never not had an image problem. That’s because being a leftist ultimately means favoring progress over tradition, which bucks the status quo. And since there are always people who see the status quo as sacrosanct, any disagreement with it will be met with derision.

This isn’t the left’s image problem, this is the right’s inhumanity problem. Before nazi punching it was political correctness. And before political correctness that it was socialism and before that a dozen-hundred little things.

They’ve always got a reason to blame their problems on us. People on the right will always complain about the left because we make them uncomfortable.

Subsequently, we don’t radicalize people either. Bucking the status quo doesn’t radicalize people. It’s their fear that does that and there’s no one who stokes the fear of a right-winger better than another right-winger.

If anything, punching nazis actually makes fewer nazis, because they aren’t out rallying and trying to convince other frightened people to join them. And when cowards get punched in the face they tend to retreat from the position that got them punched in the face in the first place.

What got us here was compromising on critical issues like white supremacy, sexism, and greed. We allowed a center-right political party, the democrats, to represent what it meant to be left-wing in the US, so there was very little real opposition to right-wing authoritarianism at the polls.

And sure, some of this compromise is the result of being beaten down for so long that a lot of us don’t have much strength left to fight, but these problems don’t flourish because some leftists got violent, they flourish because we as a people didn’t do our job right the first time around and put the kibosh on white supremacy.

Or, in other words, this isn’t the result of leftists being real leftists.

If anything, what we need to do now is affirm that this trend of right-wing authoritarianism will no longer be tolerated. We’ve babied them for so long that they brought back nazis. All on their own, and all because people with right-wing political ideologies are so invested in obeying their social hierarchy that they’ll follow those people off a cliff.

To put that in real world terms, Trump got elected for a few reasons, but chief among them:

White people are afraid of anyone who’s not white.

White people think that attacking anyone who’s not white will bring back their jobs and keep them safe.

White people think that it’s poor people, black people, and people of color who are responsible for the economy fucking them over, when it’s the very old rich white people that they’re following who are doing the fucking over.

There’s more to it, like election tampering, malfeasance, a weak left-wing political structure in the US and so on, but these are, in my opinion, the important ones that we have to acknowledge to understand why authoritarianism is at a new high.

Those are the problems they’re afraid of. They’re also the problems that they created.

To put that another way, no one saw a nazi get punched and thought it would be a good idea to join up with the nazis.

So I get your point but I don’t agree.

Finally, I totally agree that being called a nazi apologist when you’re part of a marginalized group really sucks.

This morning I had someone in my feed calling me a fascist. I’m a bisexual trans woman. Being white gives me some protection, but I’m right there on the list of people that nazis would like to eradicate, so I sympathize with you on that.