#Punching Nazis

[mckitterick]

Your icon looks like a box of hot pockets, have a good day

LOL - I suspect Tank Girl would approve

that's her, from my favorite frame in the comics:

"I can't let things be this way. We can be wonderful. We can be magnificent. We can turn this shit around."

it's angry punk but optimistic and hopeful, set in a dystopian wasteland that's also beautiful. she's pissed off at the people who killed the world, but also believes we can be better and change things for the better

and it's not idle hope: she's wearing a flak vest full of military gear and pulling on her boots to go kick some fascist capitalist ass

[antifainternational]

[evilhorse]

They called him Captain America!

(Captain America #255)

[thefugitivesaint]

Charles Biro (1911-1972), ''Daredevil Comics - Daredevil Battles Hitler'', #01, 1941 Source As an added bonus, some tuneage from the anarcho-punk band Aus-Rotten from 1994, "Fuck Nazi Sympathy" (Note: I dug this when I was 20 but I find it kind of humorous, and a little too self-serious, now even if I still agree with the sentiment wholeheartedly)

[tilbageidanmark]

[liskantope]

With regard to the recent testimony of several presidents of major universities about their policies on antisemitic speech, my orbit seems divided into people who are ignoring the story entirely and people who have reacted to it with nothing but outrage and exasperation toward the university presidents. I also find the whole event and situation frustrating and disturbing, but I'm wondering if I'm the only one out there who can't help feeling some significant degree of sympathy with the university presidents and why they might feel like they're in a bind under that type of questioning.

(I haven't gotten my hands on a more comprehensive video that shows the hearing -- the only video I was able to find that looked it might contain this was 5 hours or something -- but this treatment by David Pakman contains about the most footage I've seen. Notice how Pakman, perhaps not deliberately, distorts the sense of the MIT president's meaning in her sentence, "I've heard chants, which can be antisemitic depending on the context, when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people" by seeming to rearrange the quote in his mind so that the phrase "calling for the elimination of the Jewish people" is placed earlier in the sentence implying that calling for the elimination of the Jewish people is only sometimes antisemitic. Which is not at all what she said.)

Here's the thing: accusations of antisemitism and particularly the use of the term "genocide"/"genocidal" in speech content are being thrown around quite loosely nowadays. The way the presidents squirmed around struggling to navigate how to answer the questions was cringeworthy to be sure, and made worse by the fact that they didn't explain what they meant by "become conduct", but it's kind of understandable that they wouldn't want to straight-up say "Yes, we have a no-tolerance policy towards all calls for genocide against Jews" knowing that will immediately be turned onto them the next time a pro-Palestine slogan which someone on the pro-Israel side might interpret as antisemitic is uttered on their campus. For instance, "From the river to the sea!" seems to take on a range of meanings depending on who you ask, from "Get all Jews out of that whole piece of land!" to (according to for example Robert Wright) "Let's have a one-state solution where Palestinians get equal rights throughout that whole piece of land!"; the former can certainly be argued to be genocidal whereas a lot of protesters will probably (perhaps quite sincerely) claim the latter meaning.

(It's like during that whole debate about whether or not it's okay to punch a Nazi: I think a lot more of us may have been comfortable saying that Nazi-punching is generally okay, if it hadn't been for the fact that there was a visibly large overlap between the people advocating Nazi-punching and the types who tended to wield very broad criteria for who qualifies as a Nazi.)

I don't really have the time or energy to try to develop a full-blown stance on where the boundaries of free speech should be on college campuses or anywhere else. My general inclination would be to draw the line at speech that advocates intolerance of groups that include people that would be on the campus. So for instance, speech advocating genocide of Jews as a general group (which would include Jewish students/faculty/staff on campus), let alone speech expressing hatred toward or otherwise harassing/threatening any individuals or subsets of Jewish students/faculty/staff at the university, should not be tolerated under university policy. Speech advocating removing Israeli Jews from the state of Israel (the most extreme interpretation of "From the river to the sea!") is pretty disturbing and frighteningly reminiscent of early Nazi policy, and Jewish students wouldn't be unreasonable to feel deeply offended by it and I don't feel great about allowing it, but I'm not sure if it crosses that line. I don't know. The policy position I'm suggesting could plausibly be what the university presidents were espousing, but it was hard to tell without further clarifications from them, and it may just be wishful thinking on my part.

I do agree with David Pakman and others that, almost certainly, if you replace "antisemitic" with "anti-black" or "anti-Asian" or "misogynistic" (or probably even "anti-Muslim"), those university presidents would have without hesitation sung a very different tune, and that is an issue that needs to be examined and reckoned with. I'm not sure I'd say that it's evidence that Jews are uniquely hated among marginalized groups exactly, but it's a reflection of the fact that this recent general turn of events has kind of broken the guiding lines of certain strains of US progressive ideology.

[dougielombax]

There is more to anti-fascism than simply punching Nazis.

Okay sure that’s part of it.

But it’s not just that.

[soineffablygay]

Was writing something else entirely, accidentally ended up finishing an old Stony one shot. Bon Appetite.

[cowtownphoto]

[riotclitshave]

[shake-your-money-maker]

Always punch Nazis.

[evilhorse]

Welcome to Brooklyn.

[irradiate-space]

Hot take: Current discourse around who's justified in attacking whom in the Middle East feels like we're getting another round of the "punching up" and "punch Nazis" discourse. Lots of emotion, very few principles, lots of rules that don't generalize, and basically the only people who come out of it without dirtying themselves are the pacifists.

[spinelikericekrispy]

[orsomethingsys-is-here]

Yeah I could kill myself, but I would rather punch a nazi

[radioradio]

Hit him again! Hit him again! Harder! HARDER!!

artist unknown