If You Want to Be a Nazi in America, Pay the Price
Keeping tabs on the wannabe-Reich
Lisa Mizelle / Getty
Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.
— Ulysses S. Grant
A Nazi just got kayoed in Seattle. According to The Stranger:
Sean Patrick Duff was on his way to see Baby Driver on Sunday when he saw a white man wearing a red armband walking near 3rd Avenue and Pike Street. The man, whose name is still unknown, was being “belligerent” and “Alex Jones-style yelling” at passersby, which began drawing a small crowd, Duff told The Stranger. One bystander, a white man, approached the neo-Nazi and yelled at him to “get the fuck out of our city.” The neo-Nazi then called the man an “ape and threw a banana at him,” Duff recalled. Within moments, another man ran from across the street and punched the neo-Nazi in the jaw, knocking him out. Although he didn’t anticipate a physical altercation, Duff said he was “hopeful” that the man donning the Nazi armband would get punched. Duff noted that he was “really high on like 800 mg of THC” and stood back with about a dozen people during the incident. ” … When the man in the armband began to recover, he rolled over onto his hands and knees and reached up to someone for help, but “nobody wanted to help him,” Duff said. Soon, police officers patrolling the area arrived to the scene and the crowd dispersed. “Everyone was so joyous,” Duff said. “It was like a bonding for the community.”
The video of the punch is instructive. (You can watch it here, but be warned—as you might guess, it’s violent.) The Nazi was saying something like “They deserve the welfare.” Then a tall man guy moved forward. The Nazi, perhaps thinking that he had at last overstepped his bounds, held up his hand, saying “No, it’s fine.” It was not fine. The fascist got clocked, a haymaker past his nonexistent guard, a nice pugilistic follow-through, and down the Nazi went, collapsing like the Reichstag. Some watchers claimed to see a tooth fall from his mouth. According to New York Magazine, it took Twitter “Only 90 Minutes to Track and Knock Out a Nazi.”
Let’s cut away the cant: most Americans enjoy seeing Nazis get punched. Even if you dislike watching real human beings wearing swastika armbands getting throttled, most Americans are fans of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is essentially a moving diorama of shirtless Harrison Ford uppercutting Nazis.
According to witnesses and the Seattle Police Department, the Nazi was “instigating fights” at 3rd Avenue and Pine Street. As noted above, he allegedly tossed a banana. In this case, it’s safe to say the Nazi caused a fight, and so self-defense by the puncher in question was called for, just as self-defense would have been excusable in Charlottesville.
We all enjoy watching people punch Nazis. I think it’s safe to say Americans of all ages do; our grandparents did it professionally, the Boomers watched the Blues Brothers do it, and now millennials are jumping on the bandwagon.
But there’s been a constant stretch of debate about just when punching Nazis becomes permissible. What are we to do about Richard Spencer, who was punched back in January? At the moment, he was not engaged in a tussle. But just the night before, according to Trump stan Bill Mitchell, Spencer and his racist buddies were picking fights at a D.C. bar. We cannot afford to be naive about these people, or treat them as if they were any other collection of political actors.
Is it wrong to punch Nazis?
Yes.
Except in cases of self-defense, physically attacking Nazis is never permissible.