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New from me: When "Punch a Nazi" Goes Wrong, a deep dive into a recent viral altercation between furries on a beach where one hit another over the head with a megaphone. In the immediate aftermath, the bulk of reactions were people celebrating it as a justified case of punching Nazis. The event first drew my attention due to my distaste to people celebrating political violence, no matter the target, then continued drawing me in as I realized how warped the initial story had been and how unlikely it was that anyone else would see a reason to get a clearer picture. I spent a couple of weeks interviewing everyone I could get in touch with who had some connection to the conflict, poking around and trying to construct a full picture of what happened.
Normally I would excerpt a chunk of my post here, but this one is long and not particularly well suited to excerpting, so I'll summarize instead.
I went in assuming that the victim was some variety of conservative, warped by the standard methods to "Nazi", but the closer I looked into it, the more I realized that not even that was true. When I spoke with the victim, he described himself as a "Bernie Sanders democratic socialist," and he had the social media presence to back it up, not to mention the shirt he was wearing at the time of the assault (covered in the full array of wine-mom-liberal slogans: "Science is real", "Black lives matter", so forth).
The full story is tragicomic, an initially petty dispute given meaning over the years by the participants working to frame it as a grand political struggle. The original cause of the "Nazi" allegations was the behavior of the victim's boyfriend, who, while having similar political leanings to the victim himself, had roleplayed as a Nazi furry in the video game Garry's mod half a decade ago. This, and a couple of other vague allegations, were enough to turn a personal disagreement into a half-decade-long mission to smear his name in public and private wherever he tried to go within his community. The dispute intensified after a disagreement about responsible Covid precautions at meetups (to wit: would a voluntary, masked, outdoor meetup in 2021 kill people?), ultimately escalating to threats of lawsuits, deep mutual acrimony, and eventually this assault.
Ironically, if the victim and his boyfriend had been the far-right figures they stood accused of being, they'd be in a much better position to weather the whole controversy, with sympathetic allies to spread a counter-narrative, presenting them as martyrs and providing a community to retreat back into. Part of the tragedy of the whole sequence is that the ostracization was so effective only because the two of them were inches away culturally and politically from the leftists celebrating the assault (different primarily, as one mentioned sardonically in a message to me, in not believing random people should be assaulted for political reasons).
There's a certain futility to writing something like this. It's unlikely to reach the core audience who would need to accept it to make a meaningful difference in the ingroup reputation of the victim. Narratives have a way of reinforcing themselves, and when I reached out to writers spreading the Nazi allegations with some authority, they found excuses for every piece of evidence that suggested something more complex was in play. I can only address a crowd of uninvolved onlookers predisposed to agree with me on the material issues at hand. I felt compelled to write about it, though—both because the event is a microcosm of a lot of current cultural trends, a reminder of how destructive personal disputes become when they become charged with the sense of righteous political struggle, and because it was the sort of story big enough to permanently ruin the victim's reputation in his own community and small enough that nobody else would bother to tell his story. If someone's going to become an outcast from a community of outcasts, they deserve that much.
Full article here.
You know, I'm reminded of when Yasser Arafat died, and the generation of sociopathic serial killers his regime groomed turned on each other to consolidate power. After years and years and years of "both sides" narratives about the Israel/Palestine conflict, watching how viciously and hatefully Palestinians turned on each other when denied an opportunity to exorcise their hate on their further neighbor really gave me a certain moral clarity about the conflict. Whatever Israel's faults, those are the sorts of "partners in peace" they have to work with. I wouldn't waste my time coming up with any sort of diplomatic resolution with a political party that you just watched murder, main and torture it's political opposition in the streets either.
Likewise here, to a lesser degree. All I see here are mentally ill people programmed to hate and violence. The lack of a "valid target" does nothing to change their violent programming. That is who they are now. And likewise, seeing it so nakedly grants a certain moral clarity to the larger conflict at home.
Do you have any summary for this power struggle that happened after Yasser died? It sounds interesting, and I can't find anything that is presenting it concisely in one place after cursory googling, just bits and pieces.
Not really, these are my contemporary memories. There is a rather verbose wiki article about it that is rather anodyne IMHO. But it does cover the highlights.
I did find this Human Rights Watch article from June 12 2007
Has all the "Throwing political enemies off roofs" that I remember seeing on the news at the time.
They dramatically publicly executed the cook for the previous presidential guards? Why? There's retribution and then there's senselessness.
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