On Punching Nazis and the Normalization of Political Violence

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

-Martin Niemöller

If you're reading this you've most likely seen things like, #punchanazi trending on Twitter, Facebook or a number of other social media website. This trending hashtag came after a video emerged of the notorious self-proclaimed leader of the alt-right Richard Spencer being punched in the temple by a member of the Black-bloc. “It's an American tradition to punch Nazis,” the call came out, “Captain America did it, and so can we,” came others. And thus the normalization of political violence started. They're Nazis, after all, so why can't we punch them? Right? They don't deserve free speech, do they? They deserved to be assaulted for their beliefs, because their beliefs are so intolerable. A tolerance of intolerance is a tacit support of those beliefs, right? Or so the argument was said. By doing this – by normalizing political violence- our society has released a demon. A demon that will eventually devour us. A demon that will be the end of our society, and the principles that it was founded on. And how quickly this demon has grown.

What is this demon, you might be asking? The demon of political violence and oppression. Here is a fundamental truth about humanity: we are a violent species. It is through violence that we evolved as a species. Through warfare our earliest societies were formed. The strongest of the tribe would become chieftains, and the chieftains would become kings, and the strongest kings would become emperors. Why is it that man stopped stone and moved to bronze? The need for more powerful weapons. Why did we move from bronze, to tin, to iron to steel? The need for more powerful armies to defend ourselves. Sure there were other benefits: stronger plows, stronger homes, but the primary driving force was violence. We are a species that is teetering on the edge of humanity and animal savagery. This taming of the animal within us, however, has become a fundamental aspect of our society. The animal, however, always wants release, and in recent times it has seen vicious release: the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide and the mass slaughter of people in communist countries by their own governments. What did these all have in common? How were man's inner-animals released so easily? How were our instilled inhibitions against violence so easily cast aside? By othering.

Othering is the process by which we separate people into groups. Now, this is something that we naturally do as a society. We have our right-wingers, our left-wingers. Our southerners and our northerners. So it is therefore not inherently evil. It is when the othering takes a far more sinister turn when it becomes a tool of the animal within us. It's when we start thinking of the others as something bad, something subhuman. It is through this processes that Nazis justified to themselves their treatment of the Jews and the various other groups that they massacred. It is through this process that the Japanese military justified their atrocities against the Chinese, and it's how further political violence in the west will be justified.

We already see this happening. Just this past week a riot broke out in Berkeley California over a right-wing speaker. People were assaulted, and there was a man who was even nearly beaten to death. How was it justified? Well because the speaker was a Nazi. Everyone who went to see him was also a Nazi. How convenient for those who want to shut down others speech that there are so many Nazis out there to shut down. You'd think that Hitler had won the War. This is the problem with dehumanization of the other: once you do so, once you grant legitimacy to political violence, you unleash the animal, and the animal is hard to put back under control. Soon everyone of a different political persuasion will be the other. The poem that started out this essay describes perfectly the process that oppressive forces take to legitimize their violence against the others. They start with the most objectionable of people: the Nazis, the Communists, the un-humans. Then they move to a different target, using the same rhetoric, the same tactics to justify violence against them. And then another target, and another, until, at last only one view point is accepted. Any socially acceptable political violence, any socially acceptable censorship is a foot-in-the-door for further censorship, and for further violence. It's a slippery slope that will take all of society with it, to the bottom of some inescapable ravine. This is why it is important to protect all from political violence and censorship. I think one of the late editors of The Baltimore Sun, M. L. Mencken said it best when he said:

“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

Sooner or later this violence will escalate beyond the brink. Sooner or later someone will die because of it. Sooner or later the demon will reach it's zenith, and then it will be too late. It will be the shot heard 'round the world for the end of the great experiment we call modern society. Stop it before it's too late. Put the demon back into the box. Put the animal back into it's cage.