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savedbyreason · 8 years ago

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Contending with Dan Arel

I’d like to return from my long departure by contending with Dan Arel’s arguments for justifying punching nazis. As a former neo-nazi myself (who now identifies as a classical liberal and a secular humanist) I feel like I have a better understanding of how nazis think and about their ideology than most people talking about this subject right now, so I feel it is appropriate for me to throw my two cents into the marketplace of ideas.

On January 20th of this year the founder of the Alt. Right movement Richard Spencer was punched in the face by an ANTIFA (anti-fascist) member while giving an interview with an Australian broadcasting crew during Donald Trumps presidential inauguration. This assault sparked a debate about whether or not it was ethical to punch Nazis. Dan Arel, a liberal author and blogger, championed the movement that was justifying punching Nazis, and he contended with my colleagues and friends like Peter Boghossian and Lalo Dagach on Twitter who defended reason and secular American values.

Now, I will be contending with Dan’s arguments found in his blog “Danthropology” titled: “Should we be okay with punching Nazi’s?” and that he argued for vocally in his interview with Lalo Dagach on the Lalo Dagach Podcast on YouTube. Before you read this article, please listen to the Lalo Dagach podcast episode with Dan and read Dan’s aforementioned blog article for more context. I have provided the links to each below:

Dan’s blog: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/danthropology/2017/01/okay-punching-nazis/

Lalo Dagach Podcast: http://youtu.be/MQHP3FYSBl8

Allow me to begin to unpack this mess by listing Dan’s five main arguments and then by contending with each one individually.

1. Nazis advocate for genocide.

2. Anyone that’s not a nazi but also advocates for genocide should also be punched.

3. The victim should be a person with a significant amount of power and influence.

4. Punching stops people who advocate for genocide from the pursuit of extending their power and influence because it strikes fear into them.

5. Slippery slope arguments fail because punching people who are advocating genocide is self defense or acting in the defense of others.

After contending with Dan’s first point, I could wrap this whole thing up and call it a night. Because Dan’s entire argument fails when you take into account that most modern American Neo-Nazis do not advocate for genocide. This may be shocking to most readers, but it’s the truth none-the-less. When I was a skinhead I didn’t believe in racial genocide of any kind. And most of my comrades at the time didn’t either. In fact, the most common belief among modern racist skinheads or any individuals that identify as neo-Nazi's or national socialists/white nationalists believe the white race and it's culture is under threat of extinction and though violence may be necessary to defend their race and culture, the use of genocide is not. They believe the reason people believe they advocate for genocide is because they are just zionist lies told to make Hitler and national socialism look bad.

To Dan’s credit, he admitted that there’s a disconnect and that he could be misusing the word nazi as someone who advocates for the genocide of minorities. While it’s true that there are nazis who do advocate for ethnic genocide, they are on what I refer to as “the fringe within a fringe”. They are usually uneducated, unorganized independent skinheads that pose no real threat to society because they spend most of their lives either in prison or in poverty. They have no power or influence in the world.

But, this is not the mainstream Alt. Right “nazism” of people like Richard Spencer we are seeing today. (Some in the Alt. Right movement lean more towards the cultural libertarian side than they do the white nationalist side of the Alt. Right spectrum, as described in greater depth below, like Milo Yiannopoulos for example). I think to better understand how nazism is different today than it was in Germany back in the 1930’s and 40’s we need to examine what made nazism nazism then, and then examine how nazism in America has evolved into what we see today and examine the similarities and differences from it’s foreign predecessor.

When Hitler joined the very small German Workers Party back in the 1920’s, he added the term “National Socialist” to the party name so that it became the “National Socialist German Workers Party”, the NSDAP, or “Nazis” for short. The party was anti-democratic and deeply fascist, they were German nationalists, white supremacist and white socialists, (“White socialism” is a system where only whites benefited from the fascist-socialist state that owned all wealth and property that in Hitler’s Germany was private in name only). Neo-Nazis today will also deny that there even was a holocaust at all. That the “Final Solution” was simply Hitlers plan to expel all the Jews and all enemies of the reich from all Nazi occupied lands. That the pictures we see of thousands of frail twisted bodies frozen in horror were simply prisoners the Nazis could no longer afford to feed or treat for disease. That the holocaust is a conspiracy that the U.S. and Zionist leaders manufactured to establish a piece of land in Palestine as the state of Israel once again. Why would someone advocating genocide as a Nazi waste so much time and energy trying to deny the very genocide the Nazis are known for committing in the 1940’s? Unless, they believed genocide was wrong and that someone was trying to make Hitler and the Nazis out to be worse than they really were.

Ever since George Lincoln Rockwell started the American Nazi Party in the 1960’s, nazism in the U.S. has been evolving into something that can inter-grade with American politics better than the fascist post imperialist German Nazism of Hitler and his NSDAP. Dropping “Sieg Heil” and replacing it with “White Power” and limiting public display of the swastika were the early American Neo-Nazis first attempts at recasting the group’s image as a legitimate political party in the U.S. They were white nationalists like the original Nazis, but they denied the holocaust, did not advocate genocide, they promoted democracy over fascism and white capitalism over white socialism. David Duke of the KKK was a former American Nazi party member, as was William Pierce who founded the National Alliance and who wrote the Turner Diaries.

Now, in today’s political atmosphere, libertarian conservatism and American Neo-Nazism have clashed, evolving to inter-grate ever more into today’s political spectrum, into the hybrid known currently as the “Alt. Right” or as I call them, “Nazi Lite”. It’s the economic ideals of social libertarianism and a democracy with limited government, (which is the polar opposite of Hitlers economy), paired with white nationalism. As we are starting to see, the word “Nazi” defines a wide range of ideologies that are often conflicting ones. So, as Dan alluded to, his choice of the word Nazi as one that represents a person who advocates genocide was a poor one.

Richard Spencer, founder of the “Alt. Right” himself has never publicly advocated for genocide. As Dan said in the podcast with Lalo, Richard’s website hosted an article written by someone who was musing about whether it was justifiable to commit genocide against minorities, the very minorities that were trying to “commit genocide against whites”, in self defense. But, this is hardly enough to prove Richard Spencer is advocating for, or even believes in, genocide.

Now, while Spencer is a white nationalist, anti-Semitic and opposes gay marriage, he rejects white supremacy and slavery and believes that whites are under threat of extinction and that a “peaceful ethnic cleansing” will save it. In comparison, the original Nazis believed the white race was better than all others and that it needed a strong leader with all the political and economic power to run the white state. Today, the “Alt. Right” or the “Nazi Lite” movement believe the white race isn’t better, but never-the-less is under threat of extinction and must separate from other races to survive and be run by a limited democracy with a free market economy.

Before I move onto the rest of Dan’s points, as I said before, I could end this article now and still have successfully refuted Dan’s main argument. But I will continue as I feel this kind of faulty reasoning needs to be fully addressed and taken down intellectually so we can stifle the bad ideas coming from both the far left and the far right and replace them with good ones.

Moving onto Dan’s next point: “Anyone that’s not a nazi but also advocates for genocide should also be punched.” Dan took this position during the Lalo Dagach podcast and it is obviously Dan’s attempt at rationalizing his position and being fair. But, I missed his blog “Should we be okay with punching Jihadists”. So, his sentiment, to be fair, is lost on me.

Dan’s third point: “The victim should be a person with a significant amount of power and influence.” Dan also made this point on the Lalo Dagach podcast. And all I can say is that the people that have high positions of power and influence in the Alt. Right and Neo-Nazi movements are these movements intellectuals. These people aren’t the unorganized and uneducated “fringe within a fringe” crazies that yell “kill the Jews” while assaulting minorities and homosexuals in rural America. Many are highly educated, and they are expecting to be assaulted by some SHARP (Skinhead Against Racial Prejudice) or ANTIFA gang member and they know just how to make an assault on them work in their favor. In fact, they are hoping to be punched by a far leftist, so they can fuel their “white genocide” and “white victim” narratives by uploading videos of themselves and fellow Nazi’s being assaulted onto YouTube.

The next point Dan made was: “Punching stops people who advocate for genocide from the pursuit of extending their power and influence because it strikes fear into them.” To address this point, I guess I would refer back to my contention with Dan’s last point that punching them empowers their self-victimization. Even if it weren’t true, and that punching people that advocate genocide in fact did scare them enough to stop them from sharing their ideas, that is not the world I want to live in. Nor does any other rationally sane person that doesn’t want to live in a fascist state that confronts bad ideas with fear and violence. Isn’t that the world liberals like Dan Arel are fighting against? Dan celebrates Spencer’s assault in his blog, writing that Spencer even hired bodyguards because he feels uncomfortable in public now. But, should we be celebrating the fact that we scared someone in the marketplace of ideas out of an unreasonable position, no matter how unreasonable their ideas are? Shouldn’t the marketplace of ideas be a place where we combat bad ideas with good ones?

Dan’s final point: “Slippery slope arguments fail because punching people who are advocating genocide is self defense or acting in defense of others.” Do we justify our active behaviors that we find contemptuous in others simply because we are acting in self defense? Wouldn’t that make us hypocrites? In his blog, Dan wrote this about slippery slope arguments:

“Nazism is an ideology based on white supremacy and the eradication, through genocide, of nonwhites (and many others). A Christian, for example, can believe an atheist is evil for not believing in their god and punch them. Their action, however, is unfounded. They punched an atheist based on an appeal to their emotions.

We know Nazism is evil. We know their goals, we know where their ideology leads. If you punch a Nazi, especially if you’re one of those marginalized and threatened by their ideology, you’re acting in self-defense. Even if you’re a white person punching a Nazi, you’re acting in the defense of others.

So the slippery slope analogy fails immediately here.”

According to Dan, punching a Nazi isn’t an appeal to one’s emotions, but because we know what Nazis believe and we have seen what they’ve done in history, we have all the justification we need to punch them. Following this logic, because Christians used to slaughter pagans and non-believers, and their holy texts still can be used to justify such acts of religious terror, we should go around punching highly influential Christians too. And are we really defending ourselves from someone if they aren’t acting on their belief and therefore actually threatening us in any real way? Wouldn’t that be defending ourselves from “pre-crime”? I don’t know about Dan, but I don’t want to live in a dystopian world where Tom Cruise is crashing through my window and arresting me for something I may do in the future. I believe in the American value of free speech and the freedom to believe or advocate for whatever you want. And, when and if you cross the line from belief into action, well, we have policemen and judges to deal with crimes that have actually been committed.

Before I wrap this up, there were a few other things Dan said that I would also like to address here. In his interview with Lalo, Dan had a glass half full optimism that these assaults on people who advocate genocide with a significant amount of power and influence will be carried out perfectly, meeting the exact criteria Dan spoke about during the podcast or that we as a society collectively deemed the correct criteria for assaulting these people, that is just starry eyed optimism. I instead, and regretfully, see things unfolding much differently. I think you’d see a huge spike in homicides, hate crimes, innocent bystanders such as “formers” like me who may still have an old racist or Nazi tattoo they haven’t removed or covered yet like a swastika being assaulted, behavior that Dan himself justified when he said:

“Having a Nazi symbol like a swastika on your shoulder means you identify with Nazism and therefore a person with that tattoo should be punched.”

I think you’d see a rise in overzealous teens start down a road of recidivism in our corrections system. You’d see all kinds of negative effects on society I think Dan is ignoring to make his points.

Lastly, Dan brought up the 80’s punk scene on the Lalo Dagach podcast and talked about white supremacists and skinheads showing up to punk shows causing trouble for the punk kids who grew up opposing Nazis because of this infamy during the 80’s punk scene. I’m assuming he brought up this personal anecdote to show us how disruptive Nazis can be on a society and on a culture, but I wasn’t sure why or how that strengthened his position? As a fan of punk and someone who lived in East Los Angeles during the 80’s punk scene, I know quite well about the disturbance skins created during this time in punk rock history. This is when the anti-racist and anti-fascist SHARP gangs were born. Gangs that were and still are just as violent and disruptive. Those are not times or ways we want to adopt for how we behave in the marketplace of ideas.

Dan wrote in his blog:

“I want to make this simple. A fist to the head is still the moral high ground when you’re punching someone advocating for genocide.

If you’re not a Nazi, you have the moral high ground.”

This sounds, to me, like virtue signaling. He does not give any evidence or arguments to support that statement. He just says we need to make them afraid to share their ideas. And as I said before, fear and violence should not be welcome in the marketplace of ideas. We need to combat bad ideas with better ones. With good ones.

To Dan’s credit, he admits peaceful rational discourse is still needed and that 9.9 times out of 10 he is non-violent. But I hope, if he reads this, he will see that not only is he wrong in assuming all Nazis advocate for ethnic genocide, but that we also need to give people their right to believe and promote whatever they want to in America without assaulting them. And I hope he will see that once you don’t, and you assault someone for their ideas, you become the authoritarian fascist monster you are against.

Be Fearless. Be Free.

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