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IMO the leftists are correct. I mean, the ones that are serious about leftism. Or maybe I should say - the ones serious about what is supposed to be the most important struggle in the world, the fight against the greatest evil humanity has ever faced. And in that fight, enemy agitator has been killed. At a cost to, what, public decency? Social trust? The commons? Democratic norms of debate? None of those near-empty phrases matter more than what is cheekily undersold as "punching nazis". Has the right, by the way, ever come up with a similar term less cumbersome than "free helicopter rides" or "RAHOWA"? Something that calls for and legitimizes political violence, yet is convenient and palatable enough to employ in everyday speech? But I digress. I had never heard of Charlie Kirk prior to yesterday, me not being American. But in the context of an actual conflict, a struggle for the fate of humanity, in which one side is "the nazis" - the people of ultimate evil - what does it matter that a father, an unarmed man, or a polite debater was killed? A nazi was killed! Didn't you watch Inglorious Basterds, don't you know that this is the one good violence that everyone can agree on is necessary? Doesn't the American people regularly celebrate its historical deadly violence against the Nazis? And had Kirk not been killed, far greater evil would have befallen the American people! More of them might have been converted to naziism! "What's the worst that might happen?", one might ask in the face of a polite man getting up to stage and offering his opinions. Nazi rallies and the rise of the NSDAP, that's what. Who cares that they set out the bait politely if the end goal remains the Fourth Reich, or if not that then some even worse bastardization with American ideals that effectively results in Wolfenstein or The Man In The High Castle or Forever Trump? A world in which blacks are slowly shifted back towards exclusions and slavery, women back into the kitchen and domestic violence, and other minorities eradicated outright, and in which nothing good can be hoped for anymore, social progress is annihilated, and only caricatures of the darkest past are permitted as modes of life.
The older I get, the harder I find it to put myself into the leftist mind-space. I used to be there, but...I'm not the same person anymore. And even when I was there, I wasn't the same as leftists today, and doubly so American leftists. Still, I think it's important to consider the following: Given the values and cultural touchstones those people have been handed from birth, and the conclusions one can very directly draw from those, any elation at the death of Charlie Kirk is simply consistent with what is good and proper.
They aren't monsters. They're just regular people who actually believe what they're told, and who take seriously what they have been taught is the most important matter in the world.
This makes them monsters. At least the extremist subset of them who have drunk the Koolaid enough to literally believe this enough to celebrate violence. A monster does not need to be sadistic and take joy in doing evil, sometimes they are uncaring and hungry: acting on instinct rather than reason. Sometimes they are heroes in their own minds and do monstrous things in their futile quest to enact their utopian vision. There are many different types of monster.
The classical logical chain, Modus Ponens, goes "If A then B. A is true, therefore B." A is "my opponents are Nazis", B is "violence is justified to stop them". You've identified that the leftists are correct about "If A then B" but this is only half of the picture. The leftists are half correct and half wrong, and therefore reach a wrong conclusion and behave monstrously. And it's not some minor detail that they get wrong. "My opponents are Nazis" in the strong sense required to justify violence is a bold claim. It would not be sufficient that they wear swastikas or Heil Hitler: the part of the Nazis that justifies violence against them is the violence and genocide they use. This requires strong evidence. You can't just "be taught" that my opponents are evil and blindly believe it and start attacking them. The only way to look at the world we live in and come to the conclusion that right-wing people are literal Nazis to the level of deserving political violence is to practice sociopathic, monstrous, willful ignorance. To vilify such obvious non-villains is exactly what the Nazis themselves did that enabled them to commit so much evil.
I don't believe that ignorance or stupidity justifies evil behavior. Ignorant and stupid people still have to take responsibility for their own actions. If you lack the levels of intellectual sophistication required to parse the truth in the modern media landscape then it is your duty as a good person to practice some epistemic humility. Someone who says "I think right wingers are bad people because the news told me they hate minorities and that's wrong." Is a good person, even if they're wrong on a factual level. Someone who says "Right wing people should die because the news told me they want to kill minorities" and sincerely believes it rather than merely exaggerating for rhetorical effect, is a monster.
Here is where I suppose the American public at large has not yet noticed the extent to which things have come full circle.
WW1 (yes) and WW2 propaganda clarified that resistance to and the ultimate defeat of the Nazis was a moral imperative. Post-war Germany adopted this, at the Allies' command, and went full hog - youths were indeed taught that nazism was the ultimate evil, and that even the most minute form of it was a germ from which the Third Reich could rise again. And with no narrative to actually counter this, since any opinions to the contrary were banned either in law or in practice, this view grew ever more extreme over the generations, and ever more wide-spread, and could take uncontested hold of many public institutions. You may have heard of the Frankfurt School and the philosophical underpinnings of modern American leftism coming from Germany. But please understand - the practice of modern leftism, its modes of operation and expression, its lines of thinking and of everyday argumentation, its symbols and axioms, have also been grown here, in our youth clubs and universities and cultural centers. And then, though I know not how exactly, they made their way back across to America. It's no coincidence that you now have "Antifa".
What you have now is a synthesis of all this; American propaganda filtered through generations of German self-hatred and nationally enforced anti-nazism, and all the weight of WW2 and the Holocaust behind it. And the spearpoint of it is this - that it is better to burn down the entire country and everyone in it than to permit even the smallest expression of nazism, than to risk a repeat of the greatest atrocity that ever was.
You don't need any more strong evidence to prove that violence is justified to stop nazis, because there's the 20th century to prove it. Are you ignorant of history to deny it? Do you secretly hate the jews to downplay the unique horror of the holocaust? Are you just unworried because you aren't a minority? Are you uneducated, or unintelligent, not to see what all good people agree is the case? Such is the dominant discourse in Germany, as imposed by the victors of WW2, and you're getting a taste of it now.
Yes, but. Initially, the former Nazis were hard suppressed. Then, they were softly and quietly let back into the normal life. Of course, no openly proclaiming their views allowed ever, but you could be, e.g., ex-Nazi - especially if it's low level position - and hold a government job. Even be a lawyer or a judge. I assume most of them are dead by now, but how ironic would it be if an ex-Nazi judge would imprison a Jew under the censorship laws meant to prevent the recurrence of Nazi atrocities?
This is true, but it makes no difference. The suppression of their views was thorough enought hat whatever secret views they might have held in the back of their minds could not compete with the decidedly un-suppressed leftist tendencies of German society.
But they don't compete. They blend. Her grandpa hated the Jews and she hates the Jews. His grandpa knew the country can be only saved if certain troublesome groups are eliminated and the political debate is curtailed - and he knows the same. It's not a competition, it's an evolution.
Maybe in some hypothetical world, but not in the real one. The secret true-believing nazi who clandestinely influences procedural outcomes from a position he obtained by hiding his power level might have been an observable phenomenon in the early days of the Federal Republic, but not one that secretly handed on his antisemitism to the current generation of woke anti-zionists. I don't believe that this ideological lineage can actually be traced.
They are not direct ancestors maybe, but close relatives. Cousins or something like that. The totalitarian mindset is the same, the world model is the same - there's a group of people which is the reason of every evil and must be suppressed by all means necessary. It's true that for the modern Left the inclusion of the Jews into this group is consequential to them being so close to foundations of the Western civilization (which is the real target) that it's impossible to not include them, while for Nazis the Jews were pretty much the sole focus. But looking beyond those surface differences, the ideological skeleton behind it is surprisingly similar. And I don't think this is a coincidence.
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