A Saltshaker is a Big Mood

Reminder: someone else having hateful opinions doesn't give you an excuse to harass them

Translation:

“Please don’t let horrible people face any consequences for what they say! Their opinions are more valuable than yours!” uwu

Eat shit and die.

People who have hateful opinions don't deserve the luxury of speech

Mmmm, that's not how human rights work. Not that someone waving around the hammer and sickle would know that, I suppose.

People who vie for my murder and genocide of my people just for existing? They deserve to gain power and spew their vile rhetoric? So even though we've seen where that path leads, you're willing to redo the mistakes of the pasts because "UwU let's all get along, Jews and Nazis can live together!!!" Shut the fuck up

Hey asshole! My grandmother was Romani and she said violence was never the answer. Educate people, but only act in self defense if someone attacks you. Because "If you raise your hand first, you just give them leverage."

Meaning my grandmother, who escaped from Auschwitz, wouldn't want you to harass someone or abuse them. Because she's seen what violence can do and doesn't want the blame laid on hers - or anyone else's - doorstep. You just give those people more power against you.

You know the Jews of Germany tried talking to the Nazis? They tried to tell them they were wrong, they believed Hitler wasn't actually thattt crazy to kill an entire group of people, right? And yes, I had family die too, my great great grandmother was a Croatian Jew, she watched her 12 year old daughter get raped and beaten by Nazi and ustasa soldiers, my great great grandfather was from a Jewish Ukrainian family, he watched his brothers , sister, and father die at the hands of the Nazis, he left when he was 16 to fight the Nazis and defend his home. When it comes to Nazis there is no peaceful option, it is a fight for survival, and to sit back and talk is to invite death to your door, you have to fight at every turn to stamp out Nazism, otherwise there will be a price to pay, a price weighed by the bodies of 17 million women, men, and children.

Nazis are the perfect argument for self-defence. They're why I have very unpopular opinions on why the 2nd amendment is fundamentally necessary. And they SHOULD feel scared, they should feel that acting on their beliefs will get them a group of very angry people who refuse to have let their ancestors suffer and die for nothing. If a Nazi tries to take me to a camp for my blood ancestry, I will be the first to make them stare down the barrel of a gun.

But attacking them first will escalate a situation that can still be deescalated. And violence is a cycle. Right now, people can still be deradicalised. Right now, their words can be combatted with education. Right now is not the middle of a goddamn warzone.

There's a difference between telling someone they're a hateful, ignorant person who's making excuses for mass genocide and abusing them. Abusing violent people does not make them less violent.

Hey @georgy-zhukov @antis-delete-your-blogs-pls-thx

It'd be great if y'all tagged trigger warnings on posts.

My bad. Working on that now.

Btw don't even bother with georgy

They're a dumbass motherfucker

Of course a Tankie would apologise for mainland China! I am so unsurprised.

Reminder: someone else having hateful opinions doesn't give you an excuse to harass them

Translation:

“Please don’t let horrible people face any consequences for what they say! Their opinions are more valuable than yours!” uwu

Eat shit and die.

People who have hateful opinions don't deserve the luxury of speech

Mmmm, that's not how human rights work. Not that someone waving around the hammer and sickle would know that, I suppose.

People who vie for my murder and genocide of my people just for existing? They deserve to gain power and spew their vile rhetoric? So even though we've seen where that path leads, you're willing to redo the mistakes of the pasts because "UwU let's all get along, Jews and Nazis can live together!!!" Shut the fuck up

Hey asshole! My grandmother was Romani and she said violence was never the answer. Educate people, but only act in self defense if someone attacks you. Because "If you raise your hand first, you just give them leverage."

Meaning my grandmother, who escaped from Auschwitz, wouldn't want you to harass someone or abuse them. Because she's seen what violence can do and doesn't want the blame laid on hers - or anyone else's - doorstep. You just give those people more power against you.

You know the Jews of Germany tried talking to the Nazis? They tried to tell them they were wrong, they believed Hitler wasn't actually thattt crazy to kill an entire group of people, right? And yes, I had family die too, my great great grandmother was a Croatian Jew, she watched her 12 year old daughter get raped and beaten by Nazi and ustasa soldiers, my great great grandfather was from a Jewish Ukrainian family, he watched his brothers , sister, and father die at the hands of the Nazis, he left when he was 16 to fight the Nazis and defend his home. When it comes to Nazis there is no peaceful option, it is a fight for survival, and to sit back and talk is to invite death to your door, you have to fight at every turn to stamp out Nazism, otherwise there will be a price to pay, a price weighed by the bodies of 17 million women, men, and children.

Nazis are the perfect argument for self-defence. They're why I have very unpopular opinions on why the 2nd amendment is fundamentally necessary. And they SHOULD feel scared, they should feel that acting on their beliefs will get them a group of very angry people who refuse to have let their ancestors suffer and die for nothing. If a Nazi tries to take me to a camp for my blood ancestry, I will be the first to make them stare down the barrel of a gun.

But attacking them first will escalate a situation that can still be deescalated. And violence is a cycle. Right now, people can still be deradicalised. Right now, their words can be combatted with education. Right now is not the middle of a goddamn warzone.

There's a difference between telling someone they're a hateful, ignorant person who's making excuses for mass genocide and abusing them. Abusing violent people does not make them less violent.

Hey @georgy-zhukov @antis-delete-your-blogs-pls-thx

It'd be great if y'all tagged trigger warnings on posts.

My bad. Working on that now.

Reminder: someone else having hateful opinions doesn't give you an excuse to harass them

Translation:

“Please don’t let horrible people face any consequences for what they say! Their opinions are more valuable than yours!” uwu

Eat shit and die.

People who have hateful opinions don't deserve the luxury of speech

Mmmm, that's not how human rights work. Not that someone waving around the hammer and sickle would know that, I suppose.

People who vie for my murder and genocide of my people just for existing? They deserve to gain power and spew their vile rhetoric? So even though we've seen where that path leads, you're willing to redo the mistakes of the pasts because "UwU let's all get along, Jews and Nazis can live together!!!" Shut the fuck up

Hey asshole! My grandmother was Romani and she said violence was never the answer. Educate people, but only act in self defense if someone attacks you. Because "If you raise your hand first, you just give them leverage."

Meaning my grandmother, who escaped from Auschwitz, wouldn't want you to harass someone or abuse them. Because she's seen what violence can do and doesn't want the blame laid on hers - or anyone else's - doorstep. You just give those people more power against you.

You know the Jews of Germany tried talking to the Nazis? They tried to tell them they were wrong, they believed Hitler wasn't actually thattt crazy to kill an entire group of people, right? And yes, I had family die too, my great great grandmother was a Croatian Jew, she watched her 12 year old daughter get raped and beaten by Nazi and ustasa soldiers, my great great grandfather was from a Jewish Ukrainian family, he watched his brothers , sister, and father die at the hands of the Nazis, he left when he was 16 to fight the Nazis and defend his home. When it comes to Nazis there is no peaceful option, it is a fight for survival, and to sit back and talk is to invite death to your door, you have to fight at every turn to stamp out Nazism, otherwise there will be a price to pay, a price weighed by the bodies of 17 million women, men, and children.

Nazis are the perfect argument for self-defence. They're why I have very unpopular opinions on why the 2nd amendment is fundamentally necessary. And they SHOULD feel scared, they should feel that acting on their beliefs will get them a group of very angry people who refuse to have let their ancestors suffer and die for nothing. If a Nazi tries to take me to a camp for my blood ancestry, I will be the first to make them stare down the barrel of a gun.

But attacking them first will escalate a situation that can still be deescalated. And violence is a cycle. Right now, people can still be deradicalised. Right now, their words can be combatted with education. Right now is not the middle of a goddamn warzone.

There's a difference between telling someone they're a hateful, ignorant person who's making excuses for mass genocide and abusing them. Abusing violent people does not make them less violent.

Reminder: someone else having hateful opinions doesn't give you an excuse to harass them

Translation:

“Please don’t let horrible people face any consequences for what they say! Their opinions are more valuable than yours!” uwu

Eat shit and die.

People who have hateful opinions don't deserve the luxury of speech

Mmmm, that's not how human rights work. Not that someone waving around the hammer and sickle would know that, I suppose.

People who vie for my murder and genocide of my people just for existing? They deserve to gain power and spew their vile rhetoric? So even though we've seen where that path leads, you're willing to redo the mistakes of the pasts because "UwU let's all get along, Jews and Nazis can live together!!!" Shut the fuck up

Hey asshole! My grandmother was Romani and she said violence was never the answer. Educate people, but only act in self defense if someone attacks you. Because "If you raise your hand first, you just give them leverage."

Meaning my grandmother, who escaped from Auschwitz, wouldn't want you to harass someone or abuse them. Because she's seen what violence can do and doesn't want the blame laid on hers - or anyone else's - doorstep. You just give those people more power against you.

You're right, of course. But I doubt a Tankie is going to listen to someone telling them not to encourage shitting on human rights.

It’s honestly so fucked up that I have to worry in leftist spaces that talking about rehabilitative justice will lose me friends.

In 2010 I took a class called Terrorism in the Modern World, which was one of the best classes I’ve ever taken. We learned all about the causes and cyclical effects of terrorism, about why people get seduced by dangerous worldviews, about how we cannot possibly offer more than palliative solutions until we reckon with the task of trying to understand them. About how futile America’s endless escalations have been. It was awesome.

The following year, when Osama bin Laden was killed, all my liberal friends joined me in reminding the world that he might have done terrible evil, but he was still a human being. We huddled together to grin smugly about how much more empathetic we were than those evil hawkish conservatives. Not that I endorse that, but we were 18. Point is, at the time we construed liberalism, and leftism more broadly, as an explicit rejection of the vengeful, punitive ethic that was blanketing our world. And I know we were not alone in that. Liberals around me talked about prison reform, about transitions from criminal dysfunction back to a productive life, about reaching out to the people who were hardest to reach. I was, at that time, proud to call myself a bleeding-heart liberal.

And now I’m seeing them, the very same leftists who joined me in calling for empathy with our enemies, posting endless diatribes against those they deem too far gone for any kind of understanding. The same people who stood up in a sea of patriotic zeal and reminded us that terrorists were real human beings with motivations beyond mustache-twirling villainy are the people I see calling Trump supporters garbage, calling them worthless, calling any attempt to understand them “collusion with the oppressor”. I’m over here advocating the same exact outreach I’ve advocated all my life, the same outreach you once praised me for, but now because it’s your pet enemy I’m evil and weak and awful for it.

These were once my people, and now I don’t recognize them. I’m horrified to see them acting exactly like post-9/11 nationalist zealots, dismissing any attempt at understanding or empathy as spineless, as cowardly, as oppressive. You think I haven’t heard this all before? I’ve heard it all my life. I was a child when 9/11 happened. I don’t remember a United States not at war in the Middle East. My whole life I’ve been a pacifist, raised by pacifist parents in a pacifist community, and my whole life I’ve heard that trying to understand and reach out to your enemy instead of fucking annihilating them was weak and cowardly and siding with the terrorists. The difference is that I once had the left on my side.

Your principles do not cease to apply when it’s your pet enemy on the chopping block. Believe it or not, people who got cruel and hawkish in the face of terrorism were exactly as scared and powerless-feeling as you are now. They weren’t spouting martial rhetoric out of pure evil - there was real fear there, but they let it make them into hateful people with no sense of empathy or common humanity. Like hell I’m going to let that happen to people I once called mine.

Holy fuck, this.

The reason I don’t want to punch Nazis today is because I had all the violent graphic appalling vengeance fantasies about bin Laden…

…and by the time we got him I didn’t believe in war any more.

If we believe that extremism is seductive, why do we want to punch the people it seduces? Does half of Tumblr have some weird belief that a good whack on the head will dislodge it, like curing a mindwiped character in a cartoon show?

Thiiiiiiiiiiiiis

I can respect people who draw their lines for “When is punching the guy considered an act of defense, rather than offense?” in a different place than I do. But a lot of what I’m seeing on the Left (not just on Tumblr, but in a lot of Leftist spaces) is straight up warmongering on a small scale.

Now, I’m a Filthy Liberal, not a true Leftist, so maybe this is one of those idealogical differences that I didn’t pick up on until I understood the distinction between those two things, but…I seem to recall a time when pacifism (real pacifism, not the Batman kind) was considered a virtue on the Left.

And I can’t help but see a connection between the fact that the people who really loudly advocate punching Nazis (and honestly, I find myself struggling to care about whether or not Nazis get punched. It’s the people who merely Look Sortof Like Nazis I’m worried about) are the same people who call shippers Actual Child Molesting Pedophiles. And then those same people move from sending anon hate to doxxing and organizing mass calls to people’s bosses and to CPS and shit.

And now we’re right back to punching Nazis, except that we’re trying to ruin the lives of child molesters, except that anyone we don’t like is a Nazi or a child molester, except that when that stops working we’ll call them something else (maybe we’ll call them terrorists), and really we don’t even know who we’re shooting at anymore but goddamn it feels good to pull that trigger.

And in my head? All I’m seeing is scared, angry redneck neighbors threatening a terrified woman in a headscarf because she sortof looks like what the warmongers told us the wives of the people who attacked New York City might have looked like, and that’s enough to brand her Terrorist ‘round these parts and we don’t hold with Terrorists here.

When they say “violence begets violence,” they don’t mean the people you punch are gonna punch you back. They mean that when you run out of people to punch (or can’t reach the dude you really wanna mangle,) you’re gonna broaden the criteria for who’s an acceptable target. Osama Bin Laden becomes All Terrorists becomes Anyone Who Looks Vaguely Middle Eastern.

I wonder if the reason we’re seeing this same logic among Leftists and Liberals now is because so many of them are the kids who grew up post 9/11; in the era of warmongers telling us all to punch an amorphous and difficult to identify Enemy for the good of American Decency. And even if they recognized that the “looks like a terrorist” criteria is bullshit, they still internalized the underlying message: Violence Against the Enemy is Righteous.

All they needed was a different enemy.

I wonder if the reason we’re seeing this same logic among Leftists and Liberals now is because so many of them are the kids who grew up post 9/11; in the era of warmongers telling us all to punch an amorphous and difficult to identify Enemy for the good of American Decency. And even if they recognized that the “looks like a terrorist” criteria is bullshit, they still internalized the underlying message: Violence Against the Enemy is Righteous.

I was 18 when 9/11 happened, so I have a (mostly) adult’s outlook and view on all of this. I can really actually remember all of this stuff. In fact, 9/11 is what got me into activism. I lived in Washington DC at the time (still do), the hotbed for a lot of this activity, so I feel like what was happening here was pretty much the pulse.

And you all are 100% correct.

I remember when we used to march with buttons that said “Our Grief Is Not A Cry For War” and “An Eye For An Eye Makes The Whole World Blind”. Hell, I still HAVE those buttons. I was just sitting in an interfaith service in solidarity with C’ville last night thinking about this, and how those ideals not only have slipped away, they’re considered anathema now.

Barbara Lee, a Congresswoman from California, was the only one to vote against Bush/Cheney’s use-of-force resolution after 9/11. She had a great speech that included (ended with?)

“Let us not become the evil that we deplore.”

This was a touchstone of the Left, including the far Left… we had it on buttons & signs. We talked about how great she was. We even had (semi-joking) buttons that said Barbara Lee for President!

Now if you said that? You’d be shot down, considered not serious enough, told why you’re wrong & an apologist, probably hassled & harassed for it.

I remember reading something on Tumblr a few years back about how Bush’s “you’re either with us or against us” rhetoric & mindset, the very one we on the Left decried when it came out in the early-mid 2000s, accidentally seeped into the younger generation, and they’re now at the young adult age and getting involved in activism and politics in a big big way… and they’re using that very mindset, only reversing who “us” is. I read this and I was like “wow, yeah, that makes this all make so much sense.”

I… I remember the values of the Left in the early 2000s. I remember what it was like protesting. I remember our collective dedication to anti-violent tactics, even the Anarchist cooperative collectives & affinity groups. They were all advocating NVCD… non-violent civil disobedience. Hell, we were PROUD of our dedication to non-violence. I mean, sure, there were definitely some REALLY Far Left antifas & socialists & anarchists calling for violence, but they were a very small voice in even the Far Left… and they mostly were calling for violent revolution against the 1% (which wasn’t a term we had at the time.) and even they understood that violence was regrettable (but they felt was necessary). It was nothing like this out for blood revenge in the name of “self-defense” that I’m seeing now. Violence was talked about in hushed tones, figuratively. And it CERTAINLY wasn’t being advocated, casually, PROUDLY at that, by the majority, or even by “mainstream” movement websites.

Hell, I even went to a couple of anti-Nazi/anti-white nationalism counterprotests back in the day (early 2000s). I can tell you what those were actually like! They were all non-violent, for the most part. Anyone who was advocating violence was quickly shut down from the inside, because no one wanted it to turn into a riot. I remember one protest, who had literally ONE guy who wanted to be violent. He threw one brick at the National Alliance. The cops got him quickly… we were concerned at their brutality (there was only a little, which wasn’t okay, but luckily it stopped quickly.) Anyone who thought it was a good idea to copy him (and there was like 1 or 2 guys), we took the brick out of their hands and talked them out of it.

This is why it’s really important for activist communities to understand there’s a HISTORY of activism, and to KNOW that history, and to REACH OUT to those who were around back in the day. But keeping an archive of our history has never been a thing we did. And, frankly, many folks burn out, so there’s not always a lot of folks around now in these groups that were around back then. I also think there’s a basic assumption that “obviously since we still have to do this stuff, what you did wasn’t effective, so your knowledge is irrelevant”. Which there may be a small bit of truth to that, but it’s very small. So I think we’re the worse off for not knowing our history. And not just because every generation is having to reinvent the wheel (but there’s a lot of that too), but because we can’t put things in context, or have any kind of guidance from the past. (And I think there’s a bit of reveling in that, in the “this is new and we’re inventing this! This is OUR thing!” but I think its to our detriment.) (FWIW, I was interested in the history of activism and protest back then, and read some of the old literature from the 60s and 70s.)

So… yeah. That’s a little bit of background and history for you.

On the subject specifically of fascism, recently on Tumblr I saw an image going around titled “Doctors find a cure for fascism” or something like that, and it was an image of a bunch of smiling doctors & nurses holding baseball bats. And to people complaining about how the joke was advocating violence, the response was a dead serious “Violence is the only way to respond to fascists.”

There’s a classic short story called A lingua das bolboretas / La lengua de las mariposas (Butterfly’s Tongue) that takes place in Spain around the time of the civil war. (Read it here) It chronicles the slow development of a deep relationship between a timid country boy and his teacher. The teacher also has the admiration and love of much of the town. But then at the end everything goes to shit when the fascists take over and every townsperson who can saves themselves by acting as pro-fascism as they can. In the end when the soldiers round up all the Republicans the kid joins the throng of jeering civilians, hurling stones and insults at the man who was like a father to him.

It’s heartbreaking, but applied to my own life it’s really scary. Because it makes me wonder how many pro-SJ communities couldn’t change in a heartbeat. Is anywhere safe?

But it also makes it that much more baffling to me trying to wrap my head around the idea of strictly dividing people into fascist and not-fascist and writing off anyone with alt-right sympathies as “the only good one is a dead one.” Maybe it’s just me, but I have trouble trusting that the people making a big show of how much they hate Trump supporters would actually be on my side in a crisis like the one in the story, anymore than I think it makes any sense to target random civilians on the opposite side. Like, in the story the kid’s dad was a Republican (until they lost) but his mom was not, so I guess if his dad wasn’t willing to do it the teacher should have murdered her, right? And that would have fixed anything at all?

I despise Nazi ideology with all of my being, and I recognise they think I'm a subhuman monster for my heritage. But I also know that violence begets violence. If an entire World War (which was in fact a fair reaction to what Hitler was trying to do to my ancestors) wasn't enough firepower to crush the ideology, then perhaps firepower doesn't, in fact, crush ideologies at all.