How terrible! How horrible! How dare you say both sides are bad when one side is Nazis!

Well, I’ll tell you, there are worse things than Nazis in the world. Yes, the Nazis of the 30’s and 40’s were horrible, vile, beyond the pale. But even so, there have been worse things in the world.

That’s even leaving aside that as far as actual Nazis are concerned, there are no more than a few hundred to a few thousand out of a nation of over 300 million. You can find more people believing that the Earth is flat, that it’s hollow and there is “another world” on the inner surface, or that NASA has a sex colony on the moon. That’s actual, ideological Nazis, not the “everyone who disagrees with me is Hitler” type of “Nazis” that seems to be so popular among certain elements of the Left. And the only people who take them seriously, or at least to profess to take them seriously, are pundits on the left who present them as though they’re if not the norm then at least common to drum up support for opposition.

To us, Hitler was a monster

To Lenin and Stalin, he was an amateur.

To Mao, he was just so adorable!

In the Holocaust, the Nazis killed about 11 million people. In the Holodomor, just one of the many atrocities Stalin committed, over 12 million were starved to death. Mao basically said, “Hold my beer and watch this” and killed between 49 and 78 million people, most of them within a single four year plan.

In this running, Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo was an also-ran with 8 million killed.

So, “Nazis” vs. “Antifa”

On the one hand we’ve a handful of people of no real import, limited to saying mean things who have, with very few exceptions been no violence except in self defense (Yes, there have been exceptions, but few, and generally quickly shut down with essentially nobody making excuses for or justifying them), who apparently live rent free in a lot of Leftists heads. On the other, we’ve got an objectively larger group, that uses violence regularly, that we’re apparently not allowed to criticize for fear of being called a “Nazi sympathizer”.

Screw that. I know which one of those is actually a threat to freedom. It’s not the one using free speech in ways I don’t like. It’s the ones using violence to shut down people using free speech in ways I don’t like.

So, if you are using violence to silence people saying things you don’t like, then, no, how offended you are isn’t an excuse. How “hateful” they are isn’t an excuse. How ‘justified” you think you are isn’t an excuse. For anything short of incitement to violence where there is a real and immediate threat of that violence being carried out, the proper response is to speak in opposition.

If you really think that you’re views are superior, if you really think that you have the majority on your side, then speak out. No need for violence. Rally your side’s support, win in the political arena, and they’ll slink away as they have done time and time again, perhaps raising their voices more loudly in what they pretend is anger but is actually frustration. If they engage in actual violence, then of course you can respond in kind to the violent–not those who are simply speaking, but the actual violent.

But if you engage in violence to shut down verbal opposition, however vile you may think that opposition, then you are the fascist, whatever you might call yourself.