I think the point being made is that there is a limit to tolerance and what might be called multicultural or post modernism. I took the original comments point to be: all humans deserve respect intrinsically, but evil does exist and should not be tolerated. Yes, evil doers think they’re good. Is there a way to objectively judge this? No. This is the classical liberal dilemma re military action.
Let’s be tolerant of everyone except those who belong to groups explicitly making the world worse. Is that a subjective measure? Yes. Does that mean we shouldn’t, to use a modern phrase, “punch Nazis”? No, punch away.
Everyone has the moral authority and responsibility to act to reduce suffering.
If everyone has the moral authority, then you realize that your enemies think the same way, right? And you realize that you have just given them license to punch you too, right?
How can you believe that other people can err in their judgement of themselves and others and at the same time assume that you are immune to the same error? It's completely ridiculous.
Oh but that's the entire point! I do not assume I'm immune to the same error - in fact introspecting on this continuously is absolutely vital.
What I'm arguing against is inaction in the face of uncertainty.
The phrase "punch nazis" polluted my point. Violence against the violent is justifiable. Yes, my enemies can think the same way; this is why armed conflict exists in our world, and why being blanket "anti-war" or "anti-violence" for that matter is unfortunately naive.
Alright. Imagine a non-violent Nazi. They're not punching anyone.
Your natural move is to claim (their) speech as harmful. This inevitably descends into "My violence is merely political speech, but their political speech is violence," inverting the meaning of things.
A Nazi who believes in and practices non-violence isn't actually a Nazi. Their entire ideology (or whatever you want to call it, it isn't actually logically consistent enough to be honestly called one) is based around a violent struggle for power and racial supremacy.
They might, however, be a 'useful idiot'. Which, in its original definition, is a person propagandizing for a bad cause, originating from a devious, ruthless source, without comprehending the cause's goals.
Sadly, there's no shortage of those people in mainstream discourse.
You can't be a non-violent Nazi, violence and the idea that racial groups are constantly at war with each other is an inherent part of the ideology. There is at best a Nazi who due to the circumstances around them is not choosing to engage in violence yet.
You know the funny thing about those terrorist violence stats is that a lot of them seemed to cut off around 1974. I noticed that a few years ago. Then I did some digging and it turns out that the cutoff just magically happens to be "just right" for excluding a lot of far-left Weather Underground bombings.
The thumb has been on the scale to discount violence like the Berkley Bike Lock basher. Or, wasn't there a right wing figure punched, sans provocation, right there on video, and the judge threw that one out? I don't track those guys so I don't recall the name, but I do recall the outcome.
The cutoff for the article i linked is 2001, not 1974. It is also of killings so wouldn't include the Weather Underground anyway, neither would the other examples you give. I also don't think it is particularly relevant if far left violence was higher in 1973 because that was 50 years ago and lots of things have changed.
The fact of the matter is that today the far right commits much much higher levels of violence then the far left, if you have specific statistics that are different from that, not just some random anecdotes, please supply them.
this seems more like questioning whether or not some people have been mislabeled as X rather than whether or not violence against violence is understandable/forgivable.
This is a braindead, Hannah Arendt-level take. Not all violence is made equal. Offensive violence and defensive violence are different. Defense of the innocent is an uncontroversial good thing. Nazism advocates violence against the innocent. That makes violence against Nazis defensive in nature. Which makes violence against Nazis a good thing. Nazism has no such justification for its violence against the innocent. That makes the Nazis rounding up minorities and exterminating them offensive violence, and in case it needs to be said, a bad thing.
Nothing feels as self-justified as pre-emptive revenge. They might hurt us, I know this in my heart, so I must destroy them first.
Of course, you are the one who gets to define who is innocent, yes? That they are defending their innocent children against your influence means nothing. "I think those people want to subject my children to medically unneeded procedures, maybe sterilize them. I am defending the innocent. Therefore ..."
I think your approach lacks humility, allowance for genuine disagreement, and the general principle of not attacking first.
But Nazis want to murder me, like it's a central part of their ideology and they murdered millions of people when they were in power. You are the one who lacks humility because you want to take an ideal and apply it to the most extreme examples in the real world instead of accepting that their are some ideologies that can't be engaged in that way.
That sounds good, but then remember that someone will point a finger at some political figure and refer to them as a Nazi. Are they? Is the finger enough? Are you looking at the finger and not seeing the person?
My basic point is that when you combine two very popular flavors of the day ("punch/kill Nazis" and "that person is a Nazi"), you get a recipe for more or less random bloodshed based on little more than conjecture. It's like the Satanic Panic of the 1990s all over again, driven more by self-righteous bloodthirst than reaction to anything anyone has actually done.
You said "Imagine a non-violent Nazi", you asked about a hypothetical where someone was a Nazi, now you're trying to change the conversation about "Imagine a person who may or may not be a Nazi" which is a very different conversation and trying to act like I answered the second instead of the first.
Absolutely not. You're missing a very real situation, and that situation is "That guy's a Nazi."
You hear it over and over. This person is a fascist, that person is a Nazi. Go head, hit Google, search for (and use quotes) something like "Donald Trump is a Nazi." You'll find thousands of results returned. So, can we just go be violent at someone because someone else says "They're a Nazi"? That's what I'm talking about. You have a person, you haven't seen them do anything, they haven't done anything to you, but Rick says "He's a Nazi," so do we go punch them on Rick's word?
I keep hammering on this because we have people feeling fully justified in physically attacking others who haven't physically attacked anyone else (non-violent), but someone has ascribed Nazi to them. This isn't just a hypothetical, take that bike lock basher guy. He struck seven people on the head with a bike lock. (Interestingly, at least one of them was friendly fire.)
Now, you won't get anyone to call that left-wing terrorism, for some odd reason, and the guy completely skated. So we have these non-violent people just standing there, someone thinks "that person is a Nazi," and attacks them. That's my non-violent Nazi. Are they actually fondling an Iron Cross at home? Doing a little seig heil before bed? We don't know, and we generally will never know.
And I focus on that because, let's be honest, there's almost no actual Nazis. Probably some elderly "were Hitler Youth" hanging out in Brazil, but aside from that, it's just really sloppy slang, and I've had to hang with some people who will gleefully refer to anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders as a fascist Nazi.
I fully expect my enemies to do worse than punch me. The purpose of having a coherent philosophy is understanding who I have irreconcilable differences with (such as Nazis) and deciding whether the appropriate course of action is to ignore them or to fight them. In the case of Nazis, they pose a substantial threat to innocents, so the correct answer is to fight them.
I punch Nazis. The people I punch are Nazis. Anyone I punch is definitionally a Nazi, regardless of what they state their beliefs are. Even if they do happen to be wearing a Bernie Sanders shirt while I'm smacking them with a megaphone.
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The problem with the idea of "punch Nazis" is that it's really, really easy to go from "I punch people because they are Nazis", to "I punch people, therefore they are Nazis". This is made worse when "Nazi" and "fascist" are general epithets thrown by the left at anyone to their right.
Pre-emptive self-defense is valid. You don't have to wait for them to swing their fist into your nose. But imminence requires imminence. You do have to wait for them to be squared up and about to swing. You can't just sucker punch them from the back.
I agree and boy I wish I had not used that phrase. Ideally the other words surrounding that phrase shows that yes, I agree completely.
Just because there is no objective way to measure evil does not mean one shouldn’t attempt to fight it when one can. No, I don’t punch my political opponents.
Nazis are not monsters, they're people just like you. Their existence does not cause suffering per se, and punching a Nazi does not reduce suffering, it increases it. If you think a particular worldview is inherently evil you're not going to eradicate it by dehumanizing those who adhere to it and advocating for violence against them. The only way to achieve that is to get them to understand that they're wrong, and to do that you need to engage with them as human beings.
Needless to say, tolerating Nazis does not mean tolerating all actions inspired by Nazism.
> Nazis are not monsters, they're people just like you.
No, actually, they are monsters. Just like Jeffrey Dahmer was a monster. Pointing out that he is not that different from me is an utterly absurd equivocation.
> Their existence does not cause suffering per se
Their existence as some kind of side-effect-free theoretical-spherical-cow, no. The things they do that make them nazis, as opposed to some other group of people, like, say, a knitting club, yes.
If you choose to uphold an ideology, then you are taking responsibility for its consequences. Nazism is inherently violent, so resisting it is merely defending the innocent. After that it boils down to tactics: Punching a Nazi is a somewhat ineffective strategy, but it does tend to drive them out of the public sphere where they can gain legitimacy and the power to enact their evil. More permanent solutions are better.
"you're not going to eradicate it by dehumanizing those who adhere to it and advocating for violence against them. The only way to achieve that is to get them to understand that they're wrong"
I think you need to read a history book on WW2, because that is definitely not what happened to get rid of Nazism.
Or "Neo-Nazi Marine Plotted Mass Murder, Rape Campaigns with Group, Feds Say
While tasked with protecting the nation, Matthew Belanger was plotting a killing spree against minorities and to rape “white women to increase the production of white children,” according to federal prosecutors"
Weird that you apparently feel compelled to downplay the threat.
Um, yeah, okay, there is a crazy dude who was engaged in violent asshole behavior. I don't see how it's helpful to get all outraged and apply Nazi labels.
Let’s be tolerant of everyone except those who belong to groups explicitly making the world worse. Is that a subjective measure? Yes. Does that mean we shouldn’t, to use a modern phrase, “punch Nazis”? No, punch away.
Everyone has the moral authority and responsibility to act to reduce suffering.