andarthas-web:

aftselakhis-shaladin:

fierceawakening:

I am not going to be super intense about condemning those who punch actual Nazis… but I still believe it is impossible to know where someone is in their radicalization. Even if we know someone is indeed a Nazi, if we punch the person who is vacillating or unsure or there because he doesn’t see a way out, we’re making it harder for that person to leave.

I don’t want to make that harder. I may not be able to safely protect that person, but I want to live my life in such a way that I model “there is life after extremism,” not “if you are an extremist, you are already dead to me.”

@andarthas-web

Yes  to all of this.

There’s a good article in
the NYT, which explains both why punching is a BAD strategy….and what good
alternatives are.

They start out
describing a highly
successful non-violent action against a Nazi rally in Wunsiedel, Germany, This
one.

Then
they go on to say this:

“[…]

“I
would want to punch a Nazi in the nose, too,” Maria Stephan, a program director
at the United States Institute of Peace, told me. “But there’s a difference
between a therapeutic and strategic response.”

The
problem, she said, is that violence is simply bad strategy.

Violence
directed at white nationalists only fuels their narrative of victimhood — of a
hounded, soon-to-be-minority who can’t exercise their rights to free speech
without getting pummeled.

It also probably helps them recruit.

And more
broadly, if violence against minorities is what you find repugnant in neo-Nazi
rhetoric, then “you are using the very force you’re trying to overcome,”
Michael Nagler, the founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at the
University of California, Berkeley, told me.

Most
important perhaps, violence is just not as effective as nonviolence.

In their
2011 book, “Why Civil Resistance Works,” Dr. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth
examined how struggles are won. They found that in over 320 conflicts between
1900 and 2006, nonviolent resistance was more than twice as effective as
violent resistance in achieving change.

And nonviolent struggles were resolved
much sooner than violent ones.

The
main reason, Dr. Stephan explained to me, was that nonviolent struggles
attracted more allies more quickly.

Violent struggles, on the other hand, often
repelled people and dragged on for years. 

Their
findings highlight what we probably already intuit about protest: It’s a
performance not just for the people you may be protesting against but also for
everyone else who may be persuaded to join your side.

Take
the American civil rights movement. Part of what moved the country toward the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 were the images, broadcast to the entire country, of
steadfastly nonviolent protesters, including women and occasionally children,
being beaten, hosed and abused by white policemen and mobs.

Those
images also highlight two points emphasized by Stephanie Van Hook, the
executive director of the Metta Center for Nonviolence.

First, nonviolence is a
discipline, and as with any discipline, you need to practice to master it.
Nonviolence training was a fixture of the movement. Even the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. and his companions rehearsed in basements, role playing and
insulting one another to prepare for what was to come.

And
second, sometimes being on the receiving end of violence is the whole point.
That’s how you expose the hypocrisy and rot you’re struggling against. They
attack unprovoked. You don’t counterattack. You’re hurt. The world sees. Hearts
change.

It takes tremendous courage: Your body ends up being the canvas that
bears the evidence of the violence you’re fighting against. But
ideally, of course, we’d avoid violence altogether. This is where the sort of
planning on display at Wunsiedel is key. Humor is a particularly powerful tool
— to avoid escalation, to highlight the absurdity of absurd positions and to
deflate the puffery that, to the weak-minded at any rate, might resemble heroic
purpose. […]”