Parsing the Nazi Punch
Are we finally so gutless and noncommittal that sucker-punching a Nazi is cause for hand-wringing? Apparently so.
Is it that he is the oily kind of Nazi who is just media-savvy enough not to be sputtering about the grasping Jew’s nefarious hold on the world? Because this latest iteration of Nazi-hood is careful to express itself with the rhetoric of uplift and wholesome racial self-regard. The key to such Nazis is that they are scrupulous in how soothingly even-keeled they are.
But here’s the thing: hate speech that is murmured in a cheerily chiding tone remains hate speech. These latest Nazis are not members of the alt-right. They are Nazis. They do not get to rebrand themselves — or, rather, they remain free to do so among themselves — but we must exempt ourselves from such revisionist bullshit. I will not call such people “prominent figures of the alt-right” — I will call them what they are. Which is Nazis.
When a journalist, as a representative of a profit-seeking enterprise, and is under pressure therefore to court as many eyeballs as they can, points a camera at a Nazi, they do so in an effort not to explore the views of a vocal minority (you see? Nazis? What I did there?), but in an effort to present outlandish material and the consequent bump in viewership that comes with it. The journalist is dutifully chasing advertising dollars. In handing a megaphone to a Nazi, they do so amorally, since the aim is not disseminating the Nazi’s message per se (though this is an unintended consequence of Nazi-megaphoning) but to cultivate the foreseeable outrage it will provoke.
But the danger in this is that of “normalizing” (a disingenuous buzzword that’s getting lots of traction lately) the message in question. Because with every incremental escalation in the arms race to cultivate the outlandish, the sprawl of the forms of outlandishness we will accept extends just a little bit. And the escalation continues, and the tent grows bigger, and bits of outlandishness from farther afield are permitted inside the tent. And we are expected to welcome them.
The bigger and more crowded the tent becomes, the more rapidly will make subtle accommodations to our recently arrived tent-mates. And it is easy to imagine a day when we feel neighborly enough to offer an awkward “you do you” to the Nazi; then we stop biting our tongue around the Nazi, because we will no longer need to — the Nazi’s just another dude in the tent, right? No need to get all up in his grill.
And then the really chilling thing is the day, perhaps unnoticed by us, when we have become so acclimated to the clamor of the outlandish in the big, big tent, and we have grown so degraded in our convictions, so compromised in what we find permissible, that we no longer have the INCLINATION to call the Nazi a Nazi — so internalized has become our deference to the outlandish that we become complicit in “normalizing” them, and will accede to their preferences and cease even to remember why we have ever done otherwise.
So. As an exercise in the kind of vigilance we will one day need to in order to stave off the encroachment of the Normalized Nazi, let us agree to the following:
- We will call the Nazi by his name. Not by the rebranding he seeks to foist upon us.
- We will refrain from participation in the advance of his message — where eyeballs are sought by the peddlers of the outlandish, we will not consume it.
- Where the Nazi lays claim to some piece of the limelight, we will, if we happen upon him mouthing his blandly agreeable-seeming hate speech, we will step forward to smash his smug fucking face.
- When we see clips of a Nazi getting jacked, we will not cluck our tongues or wag our fingers. We will set it to music. Or make it a gif so we can watch a Nazi getting jacked for an hour straight if we feel like.
