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by bit-anarchist 13 days ago
Having a Nazi in a bar doesn't make it Nazi bar. It creates a tendency to become a Nazi bar, which can be counteracted by other forces.

If that logic held water, having a communist in a bar would make it a communist bar, which is ludicrous.

1 comments

That’s a false equivalence and imo disingenuous - Nazis are understood by the broad majority to be “bad”. We, the public, don’t want nazis around - period. If I go to a bar and there’s a handful of obvious nazis there, I’m leaving because said bar has said “we’re ok with Nazis” and that’s a Nazi bar.

Most communists don’t hold abhorrent beliefs such as “Jewish people should be eradicated” or “the world belongs to the aryan race”, but a Nazi is a Nazi, there’s no grey area there.

That presumes:

1) that said bar knows everyone's political mindset, including those which haven't been made public;

2) that said bar actually treats said Nazi with decency;

Also, most communists hold the belief that there must be a violent revolution and the opposition should be executed, specially those of the tankie variety.

Edit: I have noticed you switched the count of Nazis from singular to plural ("if you have a nazi in your bar" -> "If I go to a bar and there’s a handful of obvious nazis") while proposing I'm being disingenuous. This might not have mattered to you, but the prevalence of an ideology is very important to whether a bar "is a Nazi bar" or "happens to have a Nazi".

1) I did say “obvious Nazis”

2) letting a Nazi be at your bar is decency imo

3) “most” is doing some heavy lifting, and even so, you are showing the shades of communism. Nazism expresses an ideology of hate and racial superiority, it’s a completely different beast. (And yes I know that communism has been party to some ethnic cleansing such as in Stalinist Russia, however, that belief system of ethnic superiority is not inherent to communism)

1) fair enough, I was focusing on the original post;

2) disagree, the bar might be a pretty public place, so being allowed in is just the default; or they might have been personally allowed in, but is treated as the butt of jokes;

3) is it? "most" is pretty big group. If you take issue, we can replace it with "tankie". Also, does it really matter whether the motivations are racial or not? Mass murder is still mass murder, regardless of motivations.

Still, I feel like you are missing my main point. Having a Nazi, even if an obvious one, isn't enough for a bar to be nazified. It might be the trigger for that, but it might not. I argue that this "nazification process", which mirrors the "degeneration" process in libertarian literature, isn't a binary thing that should be treated this reductively.

I disagree on the “nazification” point, your main point, because fascism is the kind of insidious thing that can’t be allowed a foothold. To your point 2, even if the Nazis were allowed in to be the butt jokes, it’s still allowing them in and tolerating them.

If an establishment is aware of Nazis in their ranks and they aren’t condemning them, then they’re supporting them by way of not removing them. It’s the paradox of tolerance at play.

I don’t want to really derail into different aspects of communism, just want to say that most communists I’ve met or been exposed to only believe in violent revolution if peaceful revolution isn’t an option. Again, this isn’t, to me, an equivalent to the violent beliefs of Nazism.

I have to disagree on fascism being this insidious bogeyman. While I agree that they ought to be fought against, IMO this is reaching into red scare territory (which is fitting, given that both share a really close ideological root).

I also disagree that merely keeping a Nazi in your establishment is support for Nazism. Simply not removing a Nazi is no more than not removing a person, it doesn't speak whether the ideology will actually take root.

The paradox of intolerance, in its original form written by Karl Popper, is about discussions. In this context, intolerants are people who forego argumentation. Kicking a person, Nazi or not, who has been acting peacefully and has been engaging in argumentation isn't "intolerance against intolerance", it's intolerance proper. You may argue that you are trying to prevent a future situation with this, but unless it is a 100% guaranteed (which I argue it isn't), it's just plain intolerance.

Finally, bear in mind that there are more equivalences in beliefs than you think. Mein Kampf didn't speak anything about Jew mass murder (and it still happened), and most (as in, the ones you see "marxist-leninist" in their profile) socialists admit that a nonviolent approach is basically impossible. In the end, both ideologies share the willingness to dehumanize and murder their opposition (and for similar reasons, Nazi-brand racial hatred derives from the same core idea).