The Ironic Nazi Is Coming to an End

[mia]

...The rise of frictionless, anonymous spaces has been an important test for the strength of free speech, because they remove the friction that the real world insists upon — anything from the difficulty of finding a wide audience for your racist pamphlet to the social consequences of spouting hate speech. White nationalists hiding behind the label of “troll” — like Weev, Baked Alaska, Millennial Matt, and their thousands of anonymous comrades — can spout shit online with no work or investment, and when called on it, dance away with more jokes or claims that it’s all just talk. It’s why horrible stances are framed as “satire” or “social experiments” when the blowback happens. After all, you can’t definitively prove the intentions of an anonymous online comment, and there are a lot of bored teenagers (and adults) operating with impunity.

What happens when that modus operandi translates into the physical world, as it did in Charlottesville, when torch-bearing, flag-waving Nazis and white supremacists turned the city into a violent arena? It’s far easier to write “Hitler did nothing wrong” online and send it to nobody in particular than it is to approach someone on the street and say it to their face. The meatspace is all friction. And I don’t mean conflict here; I mean that there are constant barriers of entry. The Ironic Nazi is framed as a product of how easy platforms make it to be an asshole online. The ones who came to Charlottesville were the exact opposite: focused, methodical, and intentional in their efforts. For Gionet, it meant coordinating travel, lodging, and times to meet up with other demonstrators. It meant going out of his way to stand with literal white supremacists, and investing time, money, and possible bodily harm to do so.

Consider the words of college student Peter Cvjetanovic, a picture of whom, mid-shout while holding a tiki torch, circulated widely on social media this weekend. “I hope that the people sharing the photo are willing to listen that I’m not the angry racist they see in that photo,” he told news station KTVN, despite having traveled to Charlottesville specifically to protect the legacy of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. In the real world, it’s not “just talk” anymore.

When you break it down, the only thing people can do on the internet — contained entirely to the internet — is talk. It is all discourse, and hypotheticals, and bluster, and trolling. But it can do real harm, because as soon as that conversation spills into tangible space, the hypothetical vanishes. Even without overt violence, swarming a public space is an act intended to show force and to intimidate. Men carrying guns, wearing swastikas, and performing a Nazi salute isn’t physical violence, but it isn’t peace, either. The physical world is not a Boolean. The rules of online discourse do not translate to the meatspace, despite what trolls (an ill-fitting title for this type of public spectacle) might think. When you stand with white supremacists on the street, you are literally standing with white supremacists. There is nothing ironic about that.

http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/08/baked-alaska-charlottesville-and-the-end-of-ironic-nazi.html

[tblue37]

1. K&R for visibility. nt

[gratuitous]

2. I'll treasure the image of Baked Alaska for a long time

Lying on his back, sobbing and snotting from getting maced because he's a Nazi fuckhead.

[Solly Mack]

3. K&R

[Wounded Bear]

4. K & R ......worth a read...nt