Mock a Nazi!

Oh, I'm so pleased to see this article "How to Make Fun of Nazis" in today's NYT---you know I've been worried about the "punch a Nazi" rhetoric from the beginning (signs saying that were posted around my neighborhood on the day Trump was inaugurated as president).

Antifascists put forth some thought-compelling arguments for violent tactics against neo-nazis "before it’s too late":

"Antifascists argue that after the horrors of chattel slavery and the Holocaust, physical violence against white supremacists is both ethically justifiable and strategically effective.
We should not, they argue, abstractly assess the ethical status of violence in the absence of the values and context behind it. Instead, they put forth an ethically consistent, historically informed argument for fighting Nazis before it’s too late. "

I see their point, but, among other problems, "In the past, antifa activists have engaged with people who were clearly something less than outright neo-Nazis, raising questions about who, if anyone, deserves to be punched and whether there is such a thing as legitimate political violence." [NYT article on Antifa]

For that [who decides?] and many other reasons, I side with nonviolence--not passive "niceness" but politically active, tactical nonviolence, warrior nonviolence, as taught by Gandhi & Martin Luther King. 
Tactics which include mockery!
(I've already posted "Springtime for Hitler" and "Schicklegruber Doing the Lambeth March".)

It turns out places in Germany have been using subversive humor to turn neo-nazi marches into something like the Ministry of Silly Walks meets Confuse a Cat.

And in 2012, a Clown Counter-Protest met neo-nazi marchers with mockery in North Carolina too, among other things, tossing handfuls of white flour at white power.

What happened in Charlottesville went waaaaay beyond anything this sort of tactic could have stopped. 
But there's room for mockery in the arsenal of the Resistance. 

From "How to Make Fun of Nazis" :

"Humor is a particularly powerful tool — to avoid escalation, to highlight the absurdity of absurd positions and to deflate the puffery that, to the weak-minded at any rate, might resemble heroic purpose.
"By undercutting the gravitas white supremacists are trying to accrue, humorous counterprotests may blunt the events’ usefulness for recruitment. Brawling with bandanna-clad antifas may seem romantic to some disaffected young men, but being mocked by clowns?
Probably not so much.

"Those I spoke with appreciated the sentiment of the antifa, or anti-fascist, demonstrators who showed up in Charlottesville, members of an anti-racist group with militant and anarchist roots who are willing to fight people they consider fascists.
“I would want to punch a Nazi in the nose, too,” Maria Stephan, a program director at the United States Institute of Peace, told me. “But there’s a difference between a therapeutic and strategic response.” 

"The problem, she said, is that violence is simply bad strategy.

Violence directed at white nationalists only fuels their narrative of victimhood — of a hounded, soon-to-be-minority who can’t exercise their rights to free speech without getting pummeled. It also probably helps them recruit.

"And more broadly, if violence against minorities is what you find repugnant in neo-Nazi rhetoric, then “you are using the very force you’re trying to overcome,” Michael Nagler, the founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at the University of California, Berkeley, told me." Continue reading the main story