Taking back online and IRL communities from nazis involves sharing space and occasionally having a dialogue.
Both things are a lot like trying to play chess with a pigeon; the pigeon won’t follow the rules of the game, at most it’ll shit on the board.
The Nazi are only willing to share a space as long as they can’t kick you out, due to lack of power. But once they do it, the discourse flips from “everyone should have a voice” (implied: “we Nazi should have a voice”) to “fuck off with your degenerate shit, you don’t belong here”. And Nazi are known for using shitty rhetoric to enforce their views, to the point a rational dialogue is impossible.
That does not imply we should simply ignore people who are adjacent to the Nazi; or sometimes reproducing bits of Nazi discourse without realising it. It’s often worth to try to pull them back, before they fall into that hole. That teen leaning into inceldom, that grandpa who’s fine with most marginalised groups except “that one”, so goes on.
In the end I think we all agree there should be fewer nazis, but maybe we disagree on how to do that.
Both things are a lot like trying to play chess with a pigeon; the pigeon won’t follow the rules of the game, at most it’ll shit on the board.
The Nazi are only willing to share a space as long as they can’t kick you out, due to lack of power. But once they do it, the discourse flips from “everyone should have a voice” (implied: “we Nazi should have a voice”) to “fuck off with your degenerate shit, you don’t belong here”. And Nazi are known for using shitty rhetoric to enforce their views, to the point a rational dialogue is impossible.
That does not imply we should simply ignore people who are adjacent to the Nazi; or sometimes reproducing bits of Nazi discourse without realising it. It’s often worth to try to pull them back, before they fall into that hole. That teen leaning into inceldom, that grandpa who’s fine with most marginalised groups except “that one”, so goes on.
Pretty much.
*here’s a list of videos about this, that I heavily recommend.