They Want You to ‘Punch a Nazi’: Enacting Violence Keeps You Distracted From the Real Issue

on

A week after the deadly protest in Charlottesville, Virgina, another protest/counter protest is set to happen in Boston this Saturday. Boston law enforcement noted that they would shut down the “Free Speech Rally” at the first sign of trouble.
“If anyone gets out of control — at all — it will be shut down,” Mayor Marty Walsh said.
Hundreds of officers will be on the scene, both in uniform and undercover to attempt to keep the peace. However, if the countless other similar rallies are any indication, peace will be all but non-existent.
Make no mistake, the White-nationalists, neo-Nazis, Alt-righters, whatever you want to call them, want to be attacked.
Why would anyone want to get punched in the face, you ask? Well, it is quite simple. When violence is enacted against the white supremacists, it flips the script and they become the martyrs or victims.
Before videos emerged of white-supremacists being attacked, no one paid any attention to them. Their ideas are so horrifically stupid that they are self-defeating. However, when you punch a nazi you legitimize them. While it doesn’t legitimize their cause, it makes them victims and therefore garners more support.
There is absolutely no chance of an outspoken, swastika toting white supremacist, hell bent on a 2nd Holocaust, taking over the country and locking you up. This is why battling white supremacists is futile. There is, however, a very real system of oppression on the rise in this country that does oppress minorities, kidnaps them, cages them, and also kills them on a large scale. It was here far before Trump too.
Why aren’t these counter-protesters who show up to all these white nationalist marches out there every day trying to end the real white nationalist problem? This problem began way before Trump, Obama, or Bush, and has been perpetuated by all Presidents since Nixon. Shortly after the Jim Crow era came to an end, under the guise of ‘protecting citizens from drugs’, a new Jim Crow was ushered in. The drug war.
The millions of lives ruined, families torn apart, morally innocent people imprisoned, and innocence slaughtered is massive in scale and a far greater threat to the well-being of minorities than idiots in hoods protecting statues.
As Ajuma Baraka notes, writing for Counter Punch, 
What I find interesting about the current discussion around what many are referring to as the emboldening of the radical white supremacist right is how easy it is to mobilize opposition against the crude and overt white supremacists we saw in Charlottesville. So easy, in fact, that it’s really a distraction from the more difficult and dangerous work that needs to be done to confront the real right-wing power brokers.
It’s not just the drug war either. America’s foreign policy, perpetrated under multiple White House puppets over decades, is infinitely more dangerous than low IQ racists carrying silly flags.
America’s real white supremacists don’t identify themselves with flags—they use the seals of government agencies and company logos to officialize their corporatism into policy. They hide behind marble walls, built by slaves, and move armies around the planet like chess pieces on a board. America’s real white supremacists want you paying attention to the serfs fighting over statues so they can continue to rape the planet, extract the fruits of your labor, and spread empire all in their hellish mission to maintain their ‘order.’
As Ajamu Baraka notes:
Looking at white supremacy from this wider-angle lens, it is clear that support for the Israeli state, war on North Korea, mass black and brown incarceration, a grotesque military budget, urban gentrification, the subversion of Venezuela, the state war on black and brown people of all genders, and the war on reproductive rights are among the many manifestations of an entrenched right-wing ideology that cannot be conveniently and opportunistically reduced to Trump and the Republicans.
So, as corporate media blasts photos and videos of Antifa battling white supremacists in Boston today, telling you that there is a race war brewing — remember that they are the ones brewing it — all to keep you from looking up at the real war taking place on humanity, 24 hours a day, across the globe, carried out by people who couldn’t care less about some racist statue.
Source