I saw a movie this
weekend in which there is a scene where the audiences learns that a young girl—maybe
eight years old with adorable, dark brown curls and innocent, inquisitive eyes—is
being sexually abused by her uncle while they are away on a hunting trip. In a
very tense and impactful scene, the girl takes the shotgun and turns it on the
molester, her uncle. She points it directly at him and says nothing. He inches
forward speaking softly to her, telling her to put the weapon down. The
intensity of the scene reaches the apex as the audience knows that the girl is
either going to shoot this terrible man or he is going to grab the gun.
He grabs the gun. And
she shudders back a sob.
And in the theater,
there is almost a collective click of the tongue signaling our disapproval. Maybe,
rationally, we might all agree that the best course of action would be that she
told some authorities and this man was arrested and punished. But in that
moment, we all understood that if she shot him, we wouldn’t blame her. In that
moment, we might even celebrate her action—her very violent action.
Think of other
situations like this that we, individually and collectively, understand
violence as either morally permissible or morally good. Self-defense against
someone that is causing arbitrary harm—a rapist or murderer. Think about a wife
resisting her abusive husband. As a society, we even have laws that forgive
violence done in situations in which a person is not directly defending
themselves in that moment but has finally snapped after repeatedly being abused
or subjected to violence themselves.
Or think larger. Just
war. We celebrate violence in these cases. We might say we mourn the necessity
to resort to violence, but we celebrate the moral courage of those who chose to
use it for the good of themselves and others.
Now spiral out just a
little bit more. Think about the atrocities done to the Jewish people at the
hands of the Nazi party. Technically, maybe Hitler never pulled the lever on
any gas chamber. Maybe he never pulled a trigger. But let’s imagine a history
that is different. Let’s imagine Hitler at a rally during the height of the
concentration of Jews (and others) in work camps. In the crowd is one man who
has, so far, passed undetected. He goes to this rally just to hear it, to see
the face of this man that has created such a hate-storm against him and his
family. And as he sees the man, he is filled with the images of his friends and
children and his wife that he lost to the camps. So, he wrestles a gun from a
guard and kills Hitler.
If that were the
history, would we celebrate that man a hero? Would we mourn his use of
violence? What makes his use of violence acceptable or heroic? Is it the
defense of others? Is it the fact that he is a resisting an unjust oppressor? I
mean, this feels like part of the DNA of the United States, yea? One of our
most prized portions of our national canon is a declaration of war—one we call
the Declaration of Independence. We celebrate that moment every year—a moment
our national ancestors told tyrants and oppressors that we have had enough and
we wouldn’t sit back anymore. We would respond with violence. We celebrate
that. Every year.
On January 20, a man
named Richard Spencer was in D.C. celebrating President Trump’s inauguration.
During an interview, a protester walked up and punched him in the face. Why
would someone do that?
Richard Spencer is a
white supremacist leader that runs the National Policy Institute, a policy
think tank determined to further the causes of white nationalism and all that
comes with it. Just to give you a taste, here’s a selection of his thoughts:
“Our dream is a new
society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans. It
would be a new society based on very different ideals than, say, the
Declaration of Independence."
“At the end of the day,
America belongs to white men.”
“When we hear any
professional ‘Latino’ support this or that social program, we sense in our guts
that her policy proscriptions are rationalizations for nationalism. She might
say ‘more immigration is good’; she means ‘The Anglos are finished!’”
He’s advocated for a “peaceful ethnic cleansing” of non-whites from the U.S.
He believes in
government-sponsored forced-sterilization,
defending it saying: “We are undergoing a sad process of degeneration. …We will
need to reverse it using the state and the government. You incentivize people
with higher intelligence, you incentivize people who are healthy to have
children. And it sounds terrible and nasty, but there would be a great use of
contraception. … [The sterilized] could still enjoy sex. You are not ruining
their life.”
His rhetoric is
disgusting but carefully crafted. It’s incendiary but not threatening. He’s
able to create a movement of political and social upheaval or belligerence against
minorities.
In response to the
attack against this terrible man, I have seen many happy. The man who punched
Spencer is celebrated. Others still have renounced the use of violence saying “You shouldn’t punch people because they have detestable beliefs” and “We don’t cheer violence against speech.”
This made me think back
to the Trump rallies during the campaign season. We saw violence there, too.
Protesters were punched, violence against speech. Trump celebrated that
violence and many found that horrifying.
I bring this up for two
reasons. Firstly, I think it’s fair. If we are going to question the use of
violence, we need to question what makes punching Richard Spencer permissible but
violence against anti-Trump protesters impermissible. It’s not simply a double
standard.
Let’s go back to the
movie I saw. We believe violence can be used for good, or at the very least in
a way that is permissible. The uncle’s use of violence against the little girl
was absolutely wrong. A husband that beats his wife is using violence
impermissibly. But responding to that violence with violence would be
permissible. So, we judge the morality of the use of violence by the
circumstances surrounding it. Because of the violence he used against others, we would
celebrate the use of violence to kill Hitler. There is something about being
the victim, being the oppressed, or acting on behalf of the oppressed that we
find heroic, courageous, or simply acceptable.
Richard Spencer is not
Hitler. And as far as I know, he isn’t beating his wife. But his speech isn’t just speech either. We need to recognize
the power of words and forcefully advocating policies or beliefs that would
result in violence against people. He advocates for the use of force to remove fellow
citizens from this country based solely on their skin color, religion, and
ethnic lineage.
Personally, I think we
shouldn’t punch racists simply for being racists. I think we should resist everything they stand for. I think we should
organize. I think we should educate tirelessly. I think we should shout them
down and drown out their disgusting voices.
But I can understand
why people celebrated the punch. (Obviously, if it were anything more than a
punch he walked away from, I would hope many more people would decry it.) And
it’s not the same as Trump celebrating his supporters punching dissident
protesters at his rallies. The circumstances are one of the oppressed vs. the
oppressor. Spencer is a member of a powerful majority fomenting the use of force
against minorities. The others are a group of minorities protesting the advocacy
of that use of force at a political rally. Those are dramatically different circumstances, ones we
should consider thoughtfully.
If, like me, you want a
political environment where peaceful ideas are thoughtfully exchanged and
debated, then we must recognize that some ideas are not just speech but have a
violence packaged within them—not in the sense that they hurt feelings but in
the sense that they will cause actual physical violence against someone if the
idea is enacted. And we should work towards that end: a thoughtful exchange of peaceful ideas, not emotionally gratifying instances of punching racists.
