Summary
A group of masked men with Nazi flags protested outside a performance of “The Diary of Anne Frank” in Howell, Michigan, shouting antisemitic slurs.
Audience members were reportedly frightened and needed escorts to their cars. The Fowlerville Community Theatre, which staged the play, described the protesters’ presence as a disturbing reminder of the fear faced by Holocaust victims.
The Anti-Defamation League condemned the display. The incident follows other recent displays of racism in the area.
As a Jew I fully understand your sentiment, but it is a really dangerous thing to normalize. Everyone can change if they’re given the right kind of attention and put in a ton of work being deprogrammed. There are amazing examples of Nazis and white supremacists finally understanding the impact of their hatred. I’m not saying it’s always going to work, probably not even most of the time. But absolutes like this are not a constructive solution. Threatening death, violence, and/or refusing to even try to rehabilitate racists, bigots, and Nazis only gives them more power.
Sorry dude, we’ve already tried the kid gloves. Look where that got us.
They get violent, everyone crosses their arms disapprovingly, and they come back with friends.
It got us the moral high ground of not condoning political violence, which is huge. If we respond to their violence with more violence, it won’t end in peace and harmony, it will only exacerbate the problem.
Look, not killing them is a debatable point. Not meeting their violence with overwhelming violence leads to this kind of shit
What you’re advocating is vigilantism. In a working society, if they are committing acts of violence (aka crime), you shouldn’t need to advocate “overwhelming violence” in response, you should be advocating a working police force who can arrest them, and hold them safely until they can be judged by a jury of their peers.
I feel like vigilantism is the left making an equivalent argument to the right’s “more guns = more safety”. Unless you live in a lawless warzone, you shouldn’t want either.
Yeah well apparently we don’t have a working society any more
Then let’s make one.
My brother in christ that is literally what they are trying to do
No sir, scroll up and re-read the suggestion about “meeting violence with overwhelming violence”.
You expect cops to arrest their friends? You have a very charitable view of the kind of people that become cops.
Well until now in this discussion we haven’t established that cops were the ones committing waving the flags. But unfortunately you’re right, “some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses.”
Speaking ideally, yes obviously we all expect cops to arrest their friends when their friends are committing crimes. Unfortunately that doesn’t happen nearly as much as it should.
If you have examples of Nazi’s being beaten without political/other violence, I’d love to hear them.
The only examples I have of fighting Nazi’s are my grandfather travelling across the world from 39-45 killing them, and my grandmother hiding/getting Jewish people out of Holland while occasionally killing a Nazi in an alley. She went to a camp, but survived.
So again, would love these examples.
There are lots of examples of reformed white supremacists/nazis/racists. Like I said, it’s hard work, not saying it’s easy. My grandparents also escaped Europe, dropping family members off in any country that would take them before ending up in the US. The trauma is in my blood, so I get the impulse to want violent revenge. But I firmly believe that in order to learn anything from the horrors of WWII, we firstly have to avoid violence at any cost. Otherwise we’re just making the same mistake they did, while trying to fix their mistakes. It won’t work.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/26/opinion/sunday/why-i-left-white-nationalism.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/books/review/eli-saslow-rising-out-of-hatred.html
https://jewishpostandnews.ca/features/the-cure-for-hate-how-a-former-neo-nazi-skinhead-turned-his-life-around/
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-54526345
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/from-neo-nazi-to-hasidic-jew-former-skinhead-who-discovered-his-jewish-roots-to-speak-in-montreal
Those might not be the best examples, they’re not particularly easy to find, because it’s hard work and relatively rare. But it’s possible, and I’d argue the hard work is worth it to avoid violence.
I’m not saying people can’t be reformed, clearly they can, no argument there.
My point is that Naziism itself, or basically any authoritarian/fascist-esque government, has never been stopped without violence. In fact it’s so rare that one of the only times it happened we named it the Velvet Revolution and it required the collapse of the entire Soviet Union to prompt it.
(The rest of this is about the US, but can apply elsewhere. I’m going to use American examples due to the subject of this post, but it does apply virtually everywhere now.)
This is systemic at this point; the president of the United States is a fascist. The government will now be fascist. And as much as I like the idea of reforming each individual person, how exactly do you think that is going to play out in the US as it is today? The left in the US is extremely shy and pre-defeated. They don’t demonstrate in huge numbers, they don’t come together, they don’t reach out to other groups on a national scale and defend each other. Hell, members of the DNC immediately blamed ‘woke politics’ for their loss, and are completely out of touch with reality. Women/2SLGBTQ+/minorities of any kind now have no official party that fully backs them. So the idea we’re going to get a handful of LARPing dickless Nazi fanbois to change their tune and have that be the feel good story just won’t cut it anymore.
I’m not saying people have to go commit random acts of violence. I’m saying that the government has been co-opted. There’s no legal system to rely on any more. Women are going to need fucking Green Books for going from state-to-state. People in the US have already collectively shrugged when a school or gay club are shot up, imagine what they’ll be like now with Trump and his cronies in charge with the full Project 2025 narrative.
What I am saying is, in the time it would take you to reform these people 20 times their number will be created. If you’re a woman, LGBT, a minority, you need to come together and decide how you’re going to survive this. Is it make no noise, wait it out, hope staying hidden helps? Or is it get out there in numbers and challenge authority? What do you do with people in your community who are ‘traitors’ and tell those Nazi’s where to find the black woman hiding, the boy who came out to his parents and was chased out of the house with violence?
Those men standing there, waving Nazi fucking flags weren’t stopped. They weren’t arrested, they weren’t fined, the legal system thinks that waving the flag of a belief system that says only certain kind of humans should be allowed to live is okay, because they ‘deserve’ the freedom to do so, but women don’t have the freedom to control their bodies. That’s the system the US is now.
Good luck reforming them, I wish you the best, and I’m so sad at what is about to happen down there.
If you are from the US, need to flee, and are in the PNW, please DM me. I’ll do what I can to help you.
Huge for what? Our feelings? Certainly not huge for progress since we’ve taken several steps backwards
Huge for not being proponents of political violence. Be it for the sake of history, our legitimacy as a nation, the sake of teaching our children healthy values and civics, and sure, for our feelings, take your pick. Sometimes being a good person and using alternatives to violence is much harder than defaulting to our baser instincts.
The whole idea of modern politics is for it to be how we resolve conflicts and make progress without violence. That’s the whole point. Politics is the antithesis of violence.
Our legitimacy as a nation is being further tarnished by these fucks. And I’m perfectly OK with kids learning that people calling for violence against a group of people should be shown violence.
And again, we walked the high road for decades and it led us here. If all Nazis get are a slap on the wrist, they become emboldened. If they got punched in the head, a significant portion would roll over. There’s plenty of violent people in that crowd but plenty more just along for the ride.
Politics is not the antithesis of violence. It’s literally ceding the right to violence only to the state because it’s less personally risky. When the state maintains a modicum of restraint is generally a tolerable arraignment. When the state becomes fascist is time to reclaim the right to violence away from the state.
I’m convinced a good number of these accounts are divisiveness bots, running a psyop to intentionally stoke the flames in left-leaning forums the same way they continue to do on the right. I assume at least one will respond to this calling me a nazi sympathizer. It’s happened before for much less.
I don’t know what to do about this, because I also acknowledge that there are actual anti-fascist protesters being pulled into the narrative.
I’m as anti-fascist as they come, but (in addition to your points about winning people over) I also believe in preserving free speech, and acknowledge that there is a very fine line here. It’s free speech to wave a flag with a symbol on it, it’s free speech to say you think that flag represents hate speech and shouldn’t be allowed, but it’s hate speech to openly endorse genocide, and vigilante justice subverts the point of a justice system. If our justice system falls apart…we’re screwed.
The justice system has already failed. A convict is about to be handed the most powerful position in the world…
Yeah, notice I’m not advocating for tolerance of hate speech. I’m advocating for a working society where we don’t need to resort to vigilantism. We should be demanding that our police shut down threats of violence and hate speech without tolerance.
Btw, memes are fun, but I don’t recommend distilling philosophical concepts about ethics to memes. Much less lazily sharing them in place of thoughtful discussion. You run the risk of sharing them in a moment that makes it appear you weren’t paying any attention to the discussion at hand.
We fought a whole war about it. The ones left alive got moved into high government positions with project paperclip, leading to the right wing course we’ve been on ever since. At a minimum they need to be made afraid to broadcast their bigotry.