A Nashville lawmaker is alarmed to find a group of what appeared to be Nazis in broad daylight, marching the streets of Nashville this President's Day weekend.R
The group of more than a dozen masked individuals marched wearing red shirts and black pants, waving flags with swastikas on them. It is not clear at this time who the group is or affiliated with, though many of the shirts said "Blood Tribe."
Is that a third character in the middle back or is that Captain America's fist with some orange effect in front of it? I've been trying to make out who it's supposed to be but can't get anywhere.
oh gee a decade into worldwide hard right authoritarian rise and there's always some yahoo making this same fuckdamn stale joke IN EVERY FUCKDAMN THREAD.
The absolutist view of "freedom" in general is the problem, in my opinion. Even more liberal/progressive/whatever people pay lip service to stopping the worst of people but we can't actually do anything about it because dems use all the same shady bs they complain about repubs using.
Of course somebody will throw a bitch fit about this idea, but the people who think freedom dies when you aren't allowed to root for genocide and slavery while threatening everyone are the same people who think it should be illegal for women to wear pants so fuck them - you don't get an opinion on freedom when your idea of freedom is restricting the freedom of others to live their life or threatening the lives of others.
Meanwhile Pelosi is accusing anyone who's critical of U.S. support for Israel as being a Russian plant. Here's a crazy idea, instead of considering walking back free speech rights in the name of security we try something less drastic? Like I don't know, maybe electing someone different than Biden in the 2020 primaries? Maybe not blocking worker strikes? Maybe not sending weapons to a country using them to commit war crimes?
Let's try all those things first before we jump to removing first amendment rights.
Of course they were wearing masks. If they sincerely thought their beliefs were in the right, they wouldn't care if people knew who they were. They would proudly show themselves and stand behind those beliefs publicly.
This is a common trope in these topics. And I gotta say, to be perfectly honest, that I hate it.
Leftists/anti-fascists also rely on having face coverings to protect themselves from state repression, and doxxing from nazis, despite being right in their beliefs.
I get where you're coming from with the sentiment, I do. But rather than taking issue with the masks themselves, I'd recommend taking action (or at least encouraging it) and physically removing their masks so they can be properly doxxed themselves and face the consequences of their violent and hateful beliefs.
Edit: Case in point, here's a link to a video of the Proud Boys fighting with another, smaller, local neo Nazi group where they start to de-mask each other, towards the end of the video. They know that being exposed to the public is detrimental to their livelihoods, but will still do it to each other whenever there's a conflict.
Not defending them, but they can certainly think they are in the right and realize that most of society violently disagrees with them. I'd say they were smart to wear masks to avoid repercussions from their vile, awful, hateful behavior.
I hope that if their names come out that they lose their jobs, get their asses kicked, get disowned by family and friends, and get run out of town. They know that many people feel the same as I do so, even if they really believe the filth they represent, they are probably scared to show their faces.
You don't see any issue in allowing vigilante justice where civilians are free to murder people on the streets that have differing opinions from that of their own? Is this the world you want to live in? You think there's any chance the outcome might be something different than what you hoped for?
We (Allies) never made peace with the Nazis. We crushed their military and hanged any officials that didn't eat cyanide, but there was no treaty or surrender. We didn't even let the Germans govern themselves until we could figure out who wasn't a Nazi.
I would argue that anyone who flies that flag is effectively pledging allegiance to an enemy. And like... The enemy. The guys who industrialized genocide and literally tried to take over the world.
So idk about shooting them if they're just jerking each other off in the street. But I would like to channel Aldo Raine and carve swastikas into their foreheads.
Dude come on. Plenty of officials in West Germany after the war were Nazis. We took Nazis and used them in NASA. The US loves Nazis if they serve the ruling class or are the alternative to socialism.
The west made peace with nazis when they saved nazism by filling Germany's post-war intelligence services with them. That, and the fact that the ruling elites in the west never gave up it's admiration of them in the first place.
People have to step up and denounce this stuff publically, openly and loudly enough everywhere. And I don't mean causing violence, attacking or assaulting anyone in any way. I mean more people should step up and just state how they do not accept this and pressure their government representatives to act and do something and say something to discourage individuals like this.
If people are silent, and don't know about it then they are just the ignorant masses.
If they are silent but know that it is happening but still say nothing ... then they are complicit, because their silence is an acceptance of movements like this.
American is slowly diving into a rabbit hole that the world already visited almost a century ago.
It's easy to deal with now and it's easy to stand up and tell everyone you don't accept this.
The longer everyone stays silent and passive, the more their chances of saying anything evaporates.
When it goes on for too long and too far .... it takes far more energy and activism to stop this ugly movement.
The last time it went too far ... it took a world war and millions of dead everywhere in order to stop it ... and even then, it wasn't stopped, it was just merely controlled and brought down to a manageable level because it never really disappeared.
Principiis obsta et respice finem — ‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’
Thank you for sending me down this path of little research
They Thought They Were Free, by Milton Mayer (written in 1955)
As Mayer's Nazi friend noted, "I do not see, even now [how we could have stopped it]. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice - 'Resist the beginnings' and 'consider the end.' But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men?"
August Heckscher, the chief writer of editorials of the New York Herald Tribune, wrote that the book "suggests how easy it is for human beings in any society to fall prey to a dynamic political movement, provided their lives are sufficiently insecure, frustrated or empty."[1] He stated that the book is simultaneously a discussion on ethics, on "how political tyranny is established", and on issues in Germany and the "German mentality".
= = = = = = = =
Thanks for sharing this little tidbit ... Now I have to go a read the book for myself
Fighting, war and death is a last resort when all hope and possibility is lost.
We're not there yet so it's still possible to convince others not to follow these movements and make those that do follow so uncomfortable and unwelcome that they can stay in the shadows where they belong.
It's mostly our political leaders right now. If we allow leaders that allow this behaviour or leaders that even are part of this then we people have the power to either put them in power or remove them from power through elections.
And it's not just political leaders either .... it's those with wealth and power that fund and support these movements as well as corporations that would not mind seeing fascist and anti democratic governments in place. The more we call out the instigators and supporters, the more uncomfortable they will be.
Because it also works the other way, the more people speak out, the more they see that there are many more people who share the view of anti Nazism and anti fascism. If we all just sit silently, we never know how many supporters are around us and it makes us feel like a minority.
So speak out in public and speak up with your political leaders.
The Brits didn’t defeat Mosley and his fascism with denouncements.
In October 1937 in Liverpool, he was knocked unconscious by two stones thrown by crowd members after he delivered a fascist salute to 8,000 people from the top of a van in Walton.
The idiots in the news story are a small group of masked thugs that don't even want to be identified. So they would be far easier to denounce with words and counter protest.
Mosley was an open political leader that plastered his name everywhere and led mass public rallies that had a sizeable following. He also had a lot of political support and funding by wealthy backers who believed in this movement. Even the royal family had deep and sympathetic connections to fascist and far right ideology. At the point in history at the height of his movement ... there was not much else to do than to throw a stone at his face to stop him from going further.
This is an article on a local Tennessee FOX News page. The comments on the article have some disgusting whataboutism brain rot being posted trying to distract from the fact that THERE ARE LITERAL NAZI FLAGS BEING MARCHED UNIRONICLY IN PUBLIC. Tennessee has some filth within its borders..
these guys definitely should've caught a lot more hate than they did though. if some horrible accident befell those people, it'd have been a net positive for everyone else.
personally i've always hated Illinois Nazis, and i think i hate Nashville Nazis more.
Conservatism is a plague of oppression, sickness and death. It should be outlawed entirely.
We could at least take a page from modern Germany's laws and prohibit public expression of right wing ideologies. They know first-hand what happens when you don't deal with an infestation early.
We could at least take a page from modern Germany’s laws and prohibit public expression of right wing ideologies.
The entire German political establishment is right-wing (just like every other formal political establishment on the planet) - so obviously those laws don't mean squat.
The infuriating part is when everyone on the Right goes on Twitter and pretends they are "feds" pretending to be Right Wing for...reasons? "Feds" was trending on Twitter as this happened, and the last time there was a fascist March, the one with the khakis.
Like I'm glad they are disowning these guys but doing it by calling them Feds is actually not saying it would be bad if it was real, seems like only a matter of time before one of these groups gets into a Waco-style shootout with police and they become martyrs for some reason.
Trump ain't gonna pardon shit. Do you know how much effort signing something takes, especially if it's helping out poor people? He'll leave em to rot except maybe one high profile case to make a show of things.
The infuriating part is when everyone on the Right goes on Twitter and pretends they are "feds" pretending to be Right Wing for...reasons?
The Party of Personal Responsibility seems to be full of people who believe that any time someone agrees with them in public, it's part of a nefarious government plot to make them look bad.
It's not hard at all to be a decent person, it is the default state for most of humanity. Shitstains like those nazis actively spend more energy and resources being dicks on purpose.
Because they identify as male, and yet they may as well not have a dick, for all the value they bring to society.
Most people without dicks are not losers.
Granted, I accept that there is a subset of people who do not have a dick and are also losers, and most of these people do not deserve to be associated with these scum.
However, ultimately, the purpose of my comment was quite clearly not to insult those people, but to dig into the core of what the people in the march hold valuable and insult them.
If you're not a member of the march, you're not a dickless loser. However, if you are in the march, then in reality you are a dickless loser because neither you nor your penis (or lack thereof) has no value to society.
There was a Nazi Party of America which was quite popular before the US entered WWII and there are still millions of them today (based upon Trump voters).
Patton wanted to push onward and take the fight to the Soviets after the defeat of the Reich, and iirc he was amenable to joining forces with the Nazis. Or I could be thinking of Churchill and Operation Unthinkable, I don’t know. Either way, people were a-okay to cozy up with right-wing authoritarians to fight left-wing authoritarians (or just the left in general, I guess), and that continued all throughout the Cold War, from Latin America to Central Asia, so you can’t be far off, if not just right.
They did, and along with the Catholic Church, also facilitated the escape of numerous war criminals to South America for the same reasons. Not only Nazis, but their allies from other occupied countries.
So...they are neonazis and they somehow name themselves after a primitive type of group, a tribe, that belongs to an inferior civilization, according to their views? Are they incapable of proper thinking or what?
The best thing to do is punch them and toss them in the deepest hole you can find. The second best thing to do is to let them humiliate themselves. You just have to be careful with that second one though because of the saying about a nazi drinking at a bar.
They wear masks because they know what they do is unacceptable and would ruin their livelihood if it could be traced back to them personally.
They are still out there matching as Nazis.
Humiliation is not enough.