Reminder: If 11 good people sit down and have dinner with a known nazi, a dozen nazis have dinner.
Which is to say: Asking a nazi to leave your food establishment is simply not being a nazi.
I'm still working out how to deal with family who would dine with nazis, but do not say nazi things. I do not know how transferable nazi is, basically.
I am open to suggestions on that last. Not so much on the former.
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There is a question of power and safety. A child who eats with horrible parents does not have the same options to storm out on principle as (for instance) a peer. I would definitely not blame the kid in that case.
ReplyDeleteHowever, as a grown, independent, privileged adult, I’ve got no such excuse for coddling anyone.
“Matthew Stevenson had started hosting weekly Shabbat dinners at his campus apartment shortly after enrolling in New College in 2010. He was the only Orthodox Jew at a school with little Jewish infrastructure, so he began cooking for a small group of students at his apartment each Friday night. Matthew always drank from a kiddush cup and said the traditional prayers, but most of his guests were Christian, atheist, black or Hispanic — anyone open-minded enough to listen to a few blessings in Hebrew. Now, in the fall of 2011, Matthew invited Derek to join them.
ReplyDelete...
It was the only social invitation Derek had received since returning to campus, so he agreed to go. The Shabbat meals had sometimes included eight or 10 students, but this time only a few showed up. “Let’s try to treat him like anyone else,” Matthew remembered instructing them.
Derek arrived with a bottle of wine. Nobody mentioned white nationalism or the forum, out of respect for Matthew. Derek was quiet and polite, and he came back the next week and then the next, until after a few months, nobody felt all that threatened, and the Shabbat group grew back to its original size.”
All Nazis at those shabbat dinners, huh?
washingtonpost.com - washingtonpost
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ReplyDeleteMan, William, I wish I were surprised that you immediately flushed someone eager to spout apologia for the idea that we should just shrug and treat Nazis like they’re totally a normal thing.
ReplyDeleteBut I am not surprised... because, y’know, Nazis.
I feel like maybe there are some shades of gray here. Like there are reasons to stay in contact with people (your kids, your parents, possibly people you once loved who are now dating abusive SOs) who have absolutely abhorrent views, especially if you have made it clear that you don't agree with them but still care about them. I'd also say that a private dinner is slightly different to eating in a public establishment.
ReplyDeleteSam Zeitlin Given the large number of private comments I'm getting regarding your post, I'm going to ask you to state clearly exactly what it is you are claiming.
ReplyDeleteI'm not going to help. I'm not going to do the work. I am going to ask that you show your work. That is: What is your position, and what are you claiming?
Eva Schiffer Prolly, yeah.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to bed. Behave, ya'll.
ReplyDeleteBy which I mean: Be kind. Read and interpret charitably.
Here is my issue with refusing to interact with bigots: All people crave social interactions, so if only bigots will interact with bigots, you are enforcing an echo chamber on them. I agree that there needs to be lines. I cut off all contact with my great aunt when she said racist things about my students. But if we refuse to have anything to do with people whose ideas are bad, then we also remove any chance for them to re-evaluate their ideas, but instead encourage them to seek out people who are even more radical. Do what you need to for self care, but I just can't find the logic in blanket statements like this.
ReplyDeleteMy position is that having dinner with someone with abhorrent beliefs is not, in fact, the same thing as sharing those beliefs. Ostracism is not the only ethical course of action. It also may not always be the most effective course of action from an activist perspective. I don’t think that either of these views are particularly controversial.
ReplyDeletei tend to agree with Sam Zeitlin here. While I think it sounds nice to say something like "Don't socialize with Nazis", it has a connotation of something the Nazis said in Nazi-Germany of WWII: "Kauft nicht bei Juden!" ("Don't buy from jews!")
ReplyDeleteI'm not saying that it is a "Nazi-method" or anything, but is is an extreme way of dealing with persons, human beings.
Last point: What is a Nazi? Define it. Since the OPs point was that one part of that definition would be "a person dining with a Nazi". Which just doesn't sound very evil. Maybe not great, but certainly not evil. And certainly not evil enough to deny said person - if that is the only "Nazi" behaviour shown - a joint meal.
I'm kinda torn here... By the first posit in the OP, the people in that Washington Post article would all be labeled Nazis... but I pretty sure that would be a gross misinterpretation of the situation.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Nazis deserve no succor, I'm also not comfortable with allowing no ability to look at the situation and judge it on it's merits. Though, perhaps I am falling into a "notall" trap here...
Sitting down to dinner with a Nazi and ignoring the fact that they are a Nazi is bad. It normalises the presence of Nazis and gives tacit approval of their life choices.
ReplyDeleteSitting down to dinner with a Nazi in the hope that spending time with non-nazis will make said Nazi reconsider their life choices could actually do some good.
Unfortunately it is not obvious to an outside observer which of these two things you are doing, so at best you end up doing both and maybe I'm being cynical but I can't imagine that the benefit of the latter is going to outweigh the harm of the former.
Brian Ashford I think you just did a better job of saying what I was feeling than I did.
ReplyDeleteAlso: Intending not to normalize Nazis means nothing. Intentions aren’t magic. You sit down with a Nazi, you are normalizing Nazis.
ReplyDeleteThe story in the WaPo is explicitly the story of a group of kids normalizing a Nazi. They got used to him. They avoided asking awkward questions. They treated him as just normal folks. They gave him a pass on all the ways he was hurting others, because he was nice to them.
I’m glad that, in this one case, there was a good outcome ... but they were wrong and stupid, and they got lucky.
What Tony Lower-Basch said.
ReplyDeleteTony Lower-Basch If that was what you took away from the article, you and I have some very different views on how ideas spread and how people change their minds.
ReplyDeleteI guess the next question is whether you think that kind of disagreement is a reasonable disagreement for people to have, or if you think the fact that I would have been willing to participate in those shabbat dinners makes me, as William would have it, also a Nazi.
Sam Zeitlin : Before jumping into the (always distracting) game of “Are you calling me a Nazi?” I’d like to address another point: Youre right that we do take different things from the article. What I take away is that everybody in an 800 person school systematically shunned a Nazi. GO NEW SCHOOL!
ReplyDeleteAnd it worked. Guy was so isolated and alone that he had to confront what his ideology cost him. Somebody reaching out seems to have been a component, but the importance of the context of ostracism and isolation is clear. Let’s do way more of that. Here, I’ve even made a flow-chart:
https://plus.google.com/photos/...
Tony Lower-Basch I feel like “are you calling me a Nazi?” is significantly more on point than usual in a thread like this.
ReplyDeleteTo clarify, are you rescinding what you said in the previous post, i.e. that it was wrong and dumb for the people in the article to reach out to him, and that they were normalizing Nazism, which outweighs the expected value of what they were trying to accomplish?
Heh. I think you need arrows to/from the circle points, otherwise they aren't really flowing.
ReplyDeleteSam Zeitlin : No, I’m not rescinding anything. The kids who reached out were stupid. They got lucky precisely because their classmates did all the social heavy lifting for them. That’s what I’m saying.
ReplyDeleteMatt Johnson : Man, haven’t you got anything better to do than bust my chops about graphic design? :)
https://plus.google.com/photos/...
Well, shunning Nazi's frees up a lot of time given how prevalent they have become. :) I honestly debated on if I should say something far longer than it probably deserves.... I decided yes in case you decided to post it elsewhere, since it's not a bad flow chart to have around. If there was a good way to do so, I'd re share it.
ReplyDeleteMatt Johnson : I’m not in love with the brown-shirt color scheme, in hindsight, but don’t have any inspiration for what to replace it with. My aesthetic sense for color palettes is stuck at six-year-old candy-floss pastels.
ReplyDeleteTony Lower-Basch Got it. So, we have different theories of change. The primary role I see for the shunning in this story is that it caused him to hang out with a group of people who he wouldn’t have otherwise - people who accept him but not his ideas. I do think isolation was important to his conversion, but it was isolation from his white supremacist family, rather than isolation from college peers. Unfortunately, in many cases shunning just causes out groups to get more insular and extreme. Without the shabbat group, I think Derek would have become embittered and relied more on online white supremacists for support rather than breaking free on his own.
ReplyDeleteBut I’m not interested in arguing about the most effective form of activism - that’s a pretty evidence-laden debate and neither of us is likely to convince the other. I think shunning is a perfectly valid choice. But not shunning can also be an ethical choice.
Clearly you disagree. So now my next question (which will be my last, since clarifying major disagreements is about as good as internet discussion gets) is whether you think this is the kind of normal disagreement that reasonable people can have and get along - or whether it’s the kind of position that shouldn’t be tolerated in society and perhaps should itself be subject to shunning. The latter is what I get from William’s post.
Sam Zeitlin : I think we, as a society, need to get to the point again where being a Nazi is socially unacceptable. That means heading toward 99% shun. If you are arguing that being a Nazi should be socially acceptable then you’re in the way of that, and I’m fine with viewing your choice as unacceptable too. If we get into the high 90s, maybe I’ll be more understanding, but right now it’s all hands on deck.
ReplyDeleteHmm... I was thinking maybe it was time for me to duck silently out of this Nazi thread, but how you change people's minds is something that I have a pretty strong opinion about. I want to preface this by saying "have a relationship with someone so you can change their mind" does not mean "give people with terrible ideas a free pass to be treated just like everyone else." It's a very specific tactic that explains the psychology of what happened with those shabbat dinners. And I think it's a pertinent point that he might have never gone to those dinners if he hadn't been desperate for social connection to other humans.
ReplyDeleteSlow Ideas
(on why personal relationships are necessary if you want to change the world)
newyorker.com - Sharing Slow Ideas | The New Yorker
I should make clear that my view is not that people have no ethical obligations relating to who they hang out with. You should care about what the people you socialize with think, and if those people are nazis then you have an obligation to try to do something about it. But shunning is not the only ethical response, for reasons including what Eva posted.
ReplyDeleteSam Zeitlin : Disagreed, though not for the reasons you’re focused on.
ReplyDeleteI have (at least) three successive priorities:
Priority #1: Reduce the power and inclination for Nazis to harm their victims: Since Nazis, like cockroaches, prefer to operate in darkness and secrecy (divorcing their public faces from their deeds) public shunning and shaming are a useful tool here, not to be abandoned.
Priority #2: Where possible without conflicting with priority #1, reduce the ability for Nazis to recruit new Nazis. This is where shunning and shaming really shines. Go shaming! Make it clear that becoming a Nazi is not something casual, or something you dabble in by degrees ... it is separated by a vast canyon from civilized society, and if you cross that canyon then Nazis are your only friends.
Priority #3: Where possible without conflicting with priorities #1 and #2, encourage existing Nazis to change their ways. I think shunning is useful in this as well, but I agree that there’s room for a more robust (but, to me, largely irrelevant) debate.
I would love to live in a world where we have such a firm lock on #1 and #2 that it would be moral to politely engage Nazis in pursuit of #3. But we really, really, aren’t there today. We need to worry about keeping people safe, and stopping Nazi recruitment. Folks getting the vapors over the possibility that we will hurt the feelings of existing Nazis in doing so are in the way in a fashion that is clearly immoral. Quit that.
I think the problem here is talking in absolute language. There is time to talk to Nazis, and time to shun them. Context to do each. Comfort and safety levels to consider in each.
ReplyDeleteI feel comfortable that if you're not shunning Nazis or fascists or supporters of the Trump administration, you need to seriously consider why, and expect people who value humanity and decency to ask you to explain yourself. Rudely, often.