https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
It is necessary to be intolerant of intolerance.
But intolerance to intolerance should be the last resort and not the default. You should try all the other methods of civilized discourse first.
Not having civilized discourse with people whose political goal is to wipe me and those I love from the face of the earth. Also, “civilized discourse” requires at least two parties who are capable of such a thing.
I’m all with you that you have to gauge the person you’re interacting with. But if intolerance becomes the goto solution then we give up what we’re fighting for. If my son shows intolerance to people of other skin color I will try civilized discourse first and not throw him out of my house at the age of 10. If he’s an adult and all discourse has failed then I might show intolerance.
Tolerance for fascism is like trying to negotiate with cancer.
I agree but I wasn’t referring to fascism but the principle.
Fascism isn’t a legitimate political ideology so there’s nothing to tolerate. It’s just genocide in fancy window dressing.
It’s always good to point out that that is philosophy, not science (neither political or any other kind).
https://youtu.be/BiqDZlAZygU?t=306 rowan atkinson (mr bean) has an interesting opinion about it, I’d recommend watching the whole video.
Someone somewhere said something smart:
View Tolerance as a contract. If someone is tolerant of others, tolerate them too. But if someone is intolerant towards others, they don’t get to be tolerated either.
I really dont understand how anyone can look at the modern era of politics without a consideration for game theory, it is so useful for resolving these more nebulous or philosophical idea when it comes to thought conflicts. If your ‘opponent’ is constantly escalating and you arent responding, you are functionally forfeiting. and we all know the fascists are escalating as often and as hard as they can. if you seek peace or de-escalation you have to negotiate, and they wont do that. if you seek neutral ground you have to respond with equal escalation. and if you want to win you have to apply overwhelming force.
most conflicts in politics are not zero sum like this so its not a useful tool most of the time, but fascists are literally out for the destruction of democracy by definition, its existential by nature.
It gets easier to comprehend when it’s tempered by the knowledge of global literacy rates. In the US, for example, 54% of adults read below a 6th grade comprehension level.
More than half the planet can barely analyse the nuances between two similar statements, let alone comprehend anything that takes a formal education to learn. As a result many people lack the communicative skills that enable us to avoid conflict because they literally lack a conceptual understanding of the many words they don’t know or understand correctly.
Hell, try even explaining concepts like context and nuance to many people and their eyes glaze over. I’d like to think it’s a largely fixable problem due to insufficient education, but another side of me remembers all my classmates in highschool who failed English.
Ah, you get what you give rule.
AKA: Fuck around and find out.
These people never seem to realize that even at its most basic level, ensuring equal rights and freedoms requires a level of forfeiting individual freedoms. In order for everyone to have equal right to physical safety, you forego your freedom to punch them in the face without consequence.
These people go to talk about democracy, describe anarchy, then get upset when reality doesn’t meet their expectations. Your expectations don’t meet reality, bud.
They also don’t understand that protecting rights usually means defending awful people being awful. Rights are meaningless if only the right people get them.
It depends on your definition of awful. People with opposing opinions, perfectly within their legal bounds? Yes. People violating the rights and safety of others? Absolutely not.
Random person: Hey Hitler, can you please stop doing the Holocaust.
Hitler: Nein.
Random person: Damn, guess I can’t do anything. If I used force to stop Hitler from committing a genocide I would be just as bad, because everyone knows killing a Nazi who wants to kill every Jew and killing an innocent Jewish person are equal moral acts.I honestly don’t understand how people think like this. All they do is enable fascism and the imperial ambitions of more aggressive nations. As long as we live in a world with sovereign nations, some of those nations may do something extremely wrong that requires a war to stop, and that doesn’t mean you just let them do it. Ultimately, war is bad but genocide is worse and sometimes sacrifices have to be made (exclusion existing for nuclear war, which would render humanity and most of life on Earth extinct).
Neoliberalism is how people think like this. In order to stop the wave of strikes, protests, and violent demonstrations for workers rights the capitalist ruling class started heavily pushing the doctrine that “All acts of violence are always morally wrong”. They indoctrinate children into it through the education system and mass media. The intent was to stall the progress of workers rights movements in the long term, and it worked exactly as they intended.
The biggest thing people don’t understand is that governments exerting control necessitates violence, as laws are only recommendations otherwise.
The question of whether something should be a law should always consider: “Is this worth using violence to enforce?”
People have taken the line “violence is not the answer” to the extreme. It is true that violence is rarely the answer. However, there are times when violence is the only answer, because words will literally never work.
Violence is the last answer, when all avenues of negotiation have failed
Thank you for expressing my sentiment in a much more articulate (and concise) manner.
Similar energy:
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
Your problem is comparing Hitler’s holocaust to anything self proclaimed nazis do today. It’s far more effective to just ridicule the handful of them instead of trying to be violent.
It is absolutely an apt comparison. Genocide is a favored tool of fascists because it’s an effective way of quickly wiping away dissident civilians and destroying the mythical enemy they have in their heads. The Nazis alive today would absolutely do the Holocaust again given the ability, and fascism is too popular in too many countries for ridicule alone to work.
Contemporary Untermench Nazi Toilet Stains: We’re going to terrorize innocent people and threaten them with violence and jump them simply because they exist and we’re gonna celebrate past genocides with flags and marches and then we will overthrow the government and create the third reich with even more atrocities and and and…!!
Everybody else: Well, we’re going to fight you every step of the way and respond to your violence if necessary.
C.U.N.T.S: SO MUCH FOR THE TOLERANT LEFT!! I’M ENTITLED TO MAH OPINION!!1! YOUR OPPRESSING ME!!¤#!!! 😨😰😥😢😭😱😖😣😞😓😩😫😤😡😠🤬👿
“Germany plz stop occupying Poland”
More like “Germany plz stop occupying Czechoslovakia”.
Much of Europe celebrated the Munich Agreement, as they considered it a way to prevent a major war on the continent. Adolf Hitler announced that it was his last territorial claim in Northern Europe. Today, the Munich Agreement is widely regarded as a failed act of appeasement, and the term has become “a byword for the futility of appeasing expansionist totalitarian states.”
“Ah, darts. We didn’t appease the discourse hard enough. You can keep Czechoslovakia if you pinky-promise not to invade any more countries! If you do, we’ll be forced, to, uh, you’ll see, and you better believe we’ll do it!” (Narrator: They didn’t, in fact, do anything when Germany invaded Poland).
It was a whole bunch of that.
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Remilitarization of the Rhineland.
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Anschluß of Austria.
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The Sudetenland.
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The actual invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Nazi Germany really pulled “whatcha gonna do about this, bitch?” and got away with it for a surprisingly long time.
Appeasement doesn’t work. It did not work out for European powers, it did not work for Stalin, and more recently it did not work with Crimea/Ukraine.
Yet every time a portion of the population will wholeheartedly support appeasement policies out of what I can only assume to be a mix of abhorrent cowardice and a pathological compulsion to submit to authority. I can only imagine the kind of fucked-up childhood these people lived, to make them so afraid of fighting back even when they’re the ones holding the bigger stick.
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Asking nicely and tolerance aren’t the only other options or even necessarily the opposite of violence. Sometimes, it’s just a necessary measure and last resort. Beating people rarely changes their mind, other methods must be used, like reasoning and education (preferably even before the person has gone fascist). Obviously, the reasoning isn’t gonna work with everybody, in which cases you do whatever must be done to ensure safety.
Think of fascism as if it’s a zombie pandemic. Once it’s in progress, you save those that you can and liquidate those that are too far gone. But the real method against a zombie pandemic is to have preventative measures in place, like not letting Umbrella Corp. develop the virus in the first place.
The virus is out. The only decision now is how we respond.
I would say yes, it’s out, but fortunately, it still hasn’t hit critical mass. We can still make it if we invest more into medicine and move to Madagascar.
“If you could stop killing people by the millions in a mass cultural genocide, that would be great. Thx.”
Never thought I’d say this about the fucking Nazis, but to be fair, most of the world was entirely unaware of just how bad the concentration camps were until after the war, and those that were aware didn’t become aware until the war was already past it’s height and starting to wear down as Nazi Germany was slowly colapsing under its own weight.
Honestly, more of the world (and especially the US) was strongly opposed to the Nazis during WWII than the population now, because it’s been so long. Which makes the fact you gave even more frustrating for me honestly. Because we have the information now. We know. There’s no excuse for present day.
“Peace in our time”
I heard this claim somewhere that the reason why Neville Chamberlain agreed to it was because UK was nowhere close to being ready for war. Something along the lines of having been instructed to secure peace at all cost.
In retrospect it’s easy to see the Munic Agreement as a mistake, but I have to admit that I am curious if he had any real alternative.
They learned the wrong lessons for this war from the previous one.
The UK was nowhere close to being ready for war, but in truth, neither was Germany. Chamberlain made his decision with noble intentions, but in retrospect, even just strategically, it was still the wrong decision.
“I want to take away your human rights.”
“Actually that is bad so can you please not do so?”
“Oh I see it now, you’re right, thanks for educating me!”I can get people wanting a “one-size fits all” solution where we peacefully resolve all problems and the violent one are obviously evil.
But the unfortunate thing is, you do have to fight for “the right beliefs”, and yes the right beliefs are technically subjective and this could be abused. But there’s just no alternative to taking a specific stance and physically fighting for it no matter what.
Fascism was not defeated in WW2 only Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Japan. Everyone forgot about fascist Spain and Portugal. What’s more they even made deals with them. My country was left alone to suffer because the war was never against fascism.
Better to see WW2 as a war against fascist expansionism. But yes, Spain and Portugal were left to their own devices, and because of that, millions suffered under the rule of Franco and Salazar.
I also remember how we got to WW2 by appeasing the rising fascism instead of debating and disassembling it word for word. If we need to get to the physical violence and war to fight the evil, then we failed the early stages of disproving and debating why it’s evil. And then, just like now, its mere idea will rear ist ugly head
it’s that you have to disprove it to everyone. the ideology that “our tribe is better than theirs” is a cancer in and of itself so the more people think that and are programmed to tell others the same thing, the harder you have to work you suppress it
Yep, that is how wars of ideas work. You will have to fight generations of reactionaries and debate against those ideas point for point. Before fascism and ultra-nationalism there was the religious “our religion is better than yours”. This fanaticism still fuels religious tensions and wars in Middle East, but the reason why in Europe we have so much fewer of these tensions is due to hundreds of years of fighting both in ideas and in wars and revolts. And you should give them no quarter, because they will gather their strength and adepts and will push these ideas again. Education is the best prevention against this cancer
Fascism was defeated in the UK by some clever jokes and having a monarchy.
The UK helped defeat a couple of fascist Regimes through spending the last power of the Empire on it.
Fascist Regimes were defeated, not the concept of fascism.
The concept of fascism is not defeated through violence, it is through education and debate.
You think some young nazi is going to wake up from a baseball to the head and think “oh wow, I was so wrong about the concept of ‘might makes right’”
Fascists don’t believe in might makes right. If they did, they’d all be liberals and communists, according to the end of WW2. What fascists believe is that their ‘enemy’ can be crushed because the enemy is too weak and effete to fight back. The proper way to dispel such a notion is to crush them and look fabulous doing it
People have been doing that for years and it’s obvious to anyone with any insight that they won’t listen and don’t care.
Yeah fascism really ended in 1945 /s
Replace the word with “fascists” and it makes so much more logical sense. And this is why wording matters
That makes even less sense or do you think there aren’t any fascists left? Fascism as a dominant ideology ended in countries that still (continuously to this have) have fascists in them.
Saying they defeated fascists doesn’t imply there are no more fascists left.
I can say I hunted deer, that doesn’t mean there are no more deer left in the wild.
By referring to “fascists” (the people) rather than fascism (the ideology) you narrow your description to more accurately present the scope of your statement. The German Nazi party were fascists. They were defeated. We defeated fascists that day. There are more fascists, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t fight and defeat some number of fascists.
Millions of Nazis were permanently cured of fascism through the noble efforts of the Allies. :)
You are making jokes about it but there is actually a measurement to proof this: a lot of former fascists got high positions in post war Germany in politics, economy, jurisdiction, media, … and if a former fascist gets an influential position in a liberal democracy like post war Germany, there is no doubt they are cured. /s (if not obvious)
Politically motivated threats of brutal physical violence covers pretty much every war ever. Much to broad a definition
Violence against fascists just sounds like plain old self-defense to me.
The only solution.
It’s amazing how versatile a simple baseball bat is
