The term “radical” has a distinct meaning when it comes to the political - the term literally means “that which pertains to the root.” Ie, radical politics are politics which looks for the root causes of society’s ills. That is why radical politics is almost universally associated with left-wing politics. *Reactionary politics," on the other hand, is almost universally associated with right-wing politics - ie, ideologies that wants to prevent politics that attempts to cure the root causes of society’s ills. Right-wing ideology is always anti-radical - that is the entire point of right-wing ideology, has always been and always will be.

In other words… the only one way for a nazi to be a “radical nazi” - and that’s by becoming an ex-nazi.

No, I don‘t have scientific studies to back up my thesis. There most research towards right-wing or left-wing extremism focuses on the reasons or „reasons“ people have for radicalizing and how to prevent it from happening. Also extremists tend to be skeptical towards any person, that tries to understand their networks.

Thats why most knowledge we have about extremist structures and mentalities comes from people, that aren‘t extremists anymore. In Germany we have around 33 people per year, that call the exit program for left wing extremism, 8 of whom people that actually want help. There aren‘t statistics for people, that aren‘t far-right extremists anymore, but the private Organization Exit counted alone in the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen 145 cases of people, that want to leave the far-right in 2015. Therefore we have a very limited pool of people, that want to give scientists information about internal structures and the interrelationship of violence.

Its just what I have experienced so far. Obviously there are some neonazis, that continue their „activism“, but most of them stop at some point or at least become less active, because they know that their car could go up in flames, if they attack a refugee.

There however are some people, that left the far right, that say that they were scared of attacks from political opponents and that this fear influenced their behavior and made them paranoid, because they didn‘t know, if there were people observing them, who those people were and how many antifascists potentially observed them.

If you are a far right extremist and hear stories about a group called „Antifa“, that sets shit on fire and attacks far right extremists its going to scare you. And if someone then publishes the job, the address and name of you or one of your fellow local neonazis and puts an Antifa-Symbol on the flyer, you are going to afraid. They can act as tough, as they want: The thought, that 20 masked people you know nothing about could hunt you down and beat you up in an dark alley, when you come back from home is fucking terrifying. It doesn‘t matter, if this danger is real. It only matters, weather they thinks its real.

Everything that happened is: there was one violent attack on a neonazi, there is a lot of news coverage, some guy collects informations about his local neonazis and prints some flyers. Thats enough to intimidate them for months and prevents attacks. You attack one far right extremist to prevent hundreds of attacks against innocent people.

They won‘t feel safe at their home, when their address is doxxed by some mysterious group they know nothing about and will probably have to move. They are going to have neither the money, nor he time to do more nazi shit after an „outing“ (thats what german antifascists call the doxxing of a neonazi).

They will probably lose their job after an outing. Their neighbors will mostly distance themself from them. They will have to move, if they want to feel safe. They will be kicked out of any association, party or organization (that isn‘t a neonazi group, obviously). Friends will distance themself from them. An outing is an incredible powerful and potentially destructive tool. This way we isolate neonazis from the rest of society and force them into their own echo chambers. This way we ensure, that actions hit neonazis instead of democratic right wingers, that by coincidence in the same association as the neonazis.

Then we apply pressure on individuals of said group until they can‘t stand it any longer and either move to a different town or lay down their political activities. This way we can regularly force their leaders and important figures of neonazi-subculture into an „apolitical“ life and therefore destabilize the far right.

Obviously its also important, that neonazis get an opportunity to reintegrate into society, if they lay down their ideology, but thats not my job. My job is to make them hate their life so much, that they develop the will to take the helping hand exit programs offer them.

It definitely is a kind of mob justice, but mob justice is the only thing you can do, if the state isn‘t doing its job of protecting people.

Tldr: neonazis are just going to stop harassing people, if there are consequences. If the state doesn‘t enforce these consequences citizens are either going to enforce consequences or get terrorized by the neonazis. Attacks are a great way of intimidating neonazis into leaving people life their lifes. If they are busy fighting you they don’t have time to attack more vulnerable groups.

Edit: shortest left leaning comment

First off, it’s impossible for me to be on the same level as the corrupt police because I don’t have the institutional support that they do. That you don’t understand that is pretty damning.

Second, it’s not at random intervals. It’s predicated on Nazis. Literal “let’s do genocide” Nazis. It’s not wishy washy. It’s “we should beat up Nazis before they organize and do nazi stuff”

Your "oh they might respond by doing worse " fear is silly. Butterfly flaps it’s wings tier better not do anything because it could set something bad in motion. Tell you what, if you don’t do anything about the Nazis eventually there will definitely be death.

Ah yes, the old tolerate intolerance canard. Yeah nah, we’re past that, pal.

Wrong. You can be intolerant without being violent. This ridiculous suggestion that if you aren’t physically beating people up, then you’re automatically tolerating, even advocating, their ideology, does not make any sense no matter how often you attempt this conflation.

I think you’re a Nazi or similar and that’s why you’re so upset.

No actual thinking would lead you to that conclusion.

You probably believe this too. Unless you think laws against conspiracy and planning mass murder are a bad idea.

Announcing a desire/plan to commit crimes should lead to arrest. Not vigilantism by random citizens.

Identifying as a literal Nazi is planning mass murder with extra steps.

Despite your violent fantasies, even if I conceded that, the response to such is arrest and imprisonment, not vigilante mob violence by random schmucks on the street.

Do you truly not understand the path you’re setting out on, once you start advocating for vigilantism?

The grand irony is that you’ve basically announced here that you’re willing to commit unprovoked assault on strangers. By your very logic, others are justified in beating you up for desiring to commit violent acts!

This is a non sequitur that I guess is meant to sound profound.

Non sequitur? Following “the left believes in basic rights for all, even people they hate” with “the left do not believe some people deserve to have the basic right not to be assaulted” makes pointing out that rights are not conditional, VERY relevant.

It’d be more respectable if you simply admitted the hypocrisy, and that “the left believes in basic rights for all, even people they hate” is a straight-up lie.

Since you don’t seem to understand what “rights” are: if it doesn’t apply to EVERYONE at ALL TIMES, it’s not a “right”. Anything called a “right” that has conditions is not actually a right.

in the mean time they can get punched by decent people

No. That’s how society ultimately devolves into chaos. Setting a precedent of it being okay to just attack people on the street based on their politics is a very dangerous one. Think about what position you’d be in if your politics were the minority, and this ‘it’s fine to beat up people with politics I don’t like’ idea was actually firmly in place.

Again, you can be extremely intolerant of Nazism and similar disgusting ideologies without physical violence. Do not conflate intolerance with violence, nor a lack of violence with tolerance.

Also, below is detailed a more pragmatic reason for why ‘punching Nazis’ just straight up doesn’t ‘work’ long term, as a strategy for combatting Nazi ideology:

It may feel cathartic and satisfy primal urges for retribution, but in the long run, ‘punching Nazis’ doesn’t hurt the neo-nazi ideology, it helps it. Feeds the persecution complex, turns the guy you beat up who didn’t physically attack you first into their martyr. Gives them more fuel to rally around and further radicalize them into wanting revenge.

Prioritizing a cheap, temporary thrill over real, lasting change for the better is ultimately self-serving, and not in service of your cause; ironically, it completely undermines it.

On a purely pragmatic/practical level, it’s a bad idea, if your goal is to oppose Nazism.

Experts on extremism/terrorism etc. are all saying the exact same thing.

See for yourself: (emphasis added)

In the case of violent counterprotest tactics — e.g., punching Nazis — experts on extremism say it is likely only to aid the white supremacists’ cause.

The most commonly stated argument in favor of physically disrupting white-supremacist rallies is that society can’t give an iota of legitimacy to these groups. To allow them to spread their message of hate is to offer them a platform to recruit and to glorify their cause. What this logic leaves out is that it may well be the case that hate groups are better able to recruit and glorify their cause when they are able to engage in violence, regardless of how that violence starts, according to researchers in the field of countering violent extremism, or CVE.

“On the one hand, I don’t think these expressions should go unanswered,” David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University, said of the recent white-supremacist gatherings. “But you’re essentially giving them exactly what they want when you try to confront them directly.” That’s because these groups’ efforts to recruit and mobilize supporters rely on a very specific strategy that benefits greatly from violent conflict.

In the U.S., explicitly white-supremacist groups know they are vastly, vastly outnumbered by everyone who hates them — their paltry numbers being an easy thing to forget in the age of social media and especially so this week, in the wake of a real-life white-supremacist murder. So their only hope for relevance is to maximize every potential bit of media coverage. And the best way to do this is to create media moments: scary, evocative images like the torch photos from last weekend, but also as many violently photogenic confrontations with counterprotesters as possible. Producing violence is an underlying, often unstated, goal of many white-supremacist protests and gatherings.

When violence does break out, videos of it race through the internet’s white-supremacist underbelly, serving as incredibly valuable PR material. It doesn’t matter who gets the better of a given confrontation: When the Nazis get punched, it’s “proof” that anti-fascists or liberals or [insert minority group] or whoever else did the punching have it in for “innocent white Americans just trying to protest peacefully.” When the Nazis punch back, it’s proof that their enemies are, to borrow a word from alt-right parlance, “cucks” who are easily bested in the streets. Even when white supremacists lose street fights, they win the long game.

This sort of tactic, said Jeffrey Kaplan, an academic researcher and the author of a number of books on terrorist movements, “is a constant in terrorism or any form of asymmetric warfare,” whether the group in question is jihadist or white supremacist or whatever else. Kaplan, who is an incoming professor at King Fahd Security College in Riyadh, summed up the extremists’ logic like this: “Our numbers are paltry, we are despised by our countrymen and we couldn’t get a date for the life of us, but any action that has enough impact to strike at the heart of the enemy by getting media coverage is a major triumph.” Violent confrontations allow extremists to make a tantalizing offer to the angry, disillusioned young men — they are almost entirely men — whom they hope to groom to become tomorrow’s haters and killers: We are part of a movement to change the world, as you can see from this latest video that movement is working, and you can be a part of it.

Schanzer laid out a fairly straightforward alternative: Counterdemonstrators should respond assertively, vociferously, and in far superior numbers — but at a distance from the extremists themselves. This tactic both prevents the sort of violent conflict American hate groups want, and has the added benefit of drawing at least some media and social-media attention away from the smaller hateful gathering and toward the much larger counterprotest.

“Violence directed at white nationalists only fuels their narrative of victimhood — of a hounded, soon-to-be-minority who can’t exercise their rights to free speech without getting pummeled.” “I would want to punch a Nazi in the nose, too,” Maria Stephan, a program director at the United States Institute of Peace, told him. “But there’s a difference between a therapeutic and strategic response.”

Even former white supremacists admit punching Nazis plays right into their hands, gives them exactly what they want:

…when mouthpieces for white supremacist ideology are physically assaulted on camera, it becomes a powerful validation of their victimhood complex: in their minds, plain evidence that white people are indeed under attack, and motivation to spread a call to violent response with renewed zeal. This “punch felt round the world” was a great boost to the “alt-right” cause. If you aid and comfort neo-Nazis, which is exactly what punching them in the face does, you are no better than they are. Real life isn’t a fucking Quentin Tarantino movie.

When I was a neo-Nazi skinhead over 2 decades ago, I got beat up as often as I beat anyone else up. It never made me any less violent. In fact, we used to pile into vans and drive from Milwaukee to Chicago for the thrill of brawling fellow devotees of romantic violence like the guy throwing the punch in this video. We lived for violent opposition. We thrived on it. Violence of any sort, no matter how it may be rationalized, is the bread of hatred. We put mustard on that shit and gleefully gobbled it up and clamored for more.

Back in the 1930s, there were gangs of communists who routinely brawled the Nazi brownshirts in the streets of Germany. Their contemporaries would have us believe that if there were more communists who brawled harder than they did back then, that the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened. As a former neo-Nazi, I can attest to how important it is to have violent opposition in order to maintain the hatred necessary to hurt people. The communist gangs helped Hitler’s National Socialist party come to power not only by galvanizing their own members, but more importantly by serving as a crucial ingredient in the overall atmosphere of fear and loathing that led the German general public to look to the Nazi party for order.

Your user history is disgusting. You’re constantly contentious.

I disagree with things when I have good reason to, and I back up every position I take. That’s more than I can say for you. And your type is always the first/only to lob personal insults, in response to your position(s) being challenged, making this accusation a particularly amusing bit of projection.

You pick fights with others

Correcting a false statement is not picking a fight. It only seems that way to people so embroiled in identity politics that they’ve lost the ability to distinguish between a challenge to their politics/assumptions, and a personal attack.

No one is gonna do homework for a bad faith actor.

I’ve not asked anyone to ‘do homework’.

I would be surprised if you had any friends who would willingly talk to you in real life.

That must be because your definition of “friend” is ‘someone who agrees with me on everything and never contradicts me’, and you’re projecting that onto me, after I’ve demonstrated the willingness to engage someone in disagreement.

I have plenty of friends. I don’t require my friends to agree with me–I welcome challenges to any positions I hold, that’s how they get corrected/revised/strengthened over time. The only prerequisite is that the challenge must be of substance–if it’s standard ideologue far of emotional arguments, or just repeating talking points you’ve done no original thinking about, you’re not going to get anywhere with someone who actually uses their brain.

I get the distinct impression you’ve never “steelmanned” an argument in your life.

And yeah, if you got hit out there in real life, I would laugh while you would rub your jaw.

This makes you a bad person, objectively.

I celebrate nazis getting hit.

I’d rather strike the ideology than the individual, especially given what I’ve learned in my research about how ‘punching Nazis’ literally helps them in the long term. (see the comment I posted immediately prior to this for details/citations)

That’s the kind of person you are.

It’s truly indicative of your political extremism that you’re labeling me a Nazi, just for contrdicting you.

You could change, but we both know you’re not going to.

I’ve changed my positions many times over the years. Thing is, it requires a challenge of substance to do so. Lobbing personal insults and calling people Nazis for having the temerity to contradict you? Well, that ain’t it, sunshine.

And you will never ever enjoy the comforts of a sincere human relationship.

This really is pathetic, you know? To create this ridiculous fantasy in your mind about how, since I’ve contradicted you, I must be the biggest loser you can conceive of. Extra little bit of irony is that I received one of my SO’s frequent (we’re both on the mushy side, I’ll admit) expressions of love, just as I was reading the above sentence.

Now, just because it’s funny to me, I’m going to show you my political compass and 8values test results, knowing you will have no idea how to integrate the absurd assumptions you’ve made about me, with them. I predict you’ll accuse them of being fabricated; after all, denial is generally the easiest way to hide from inconvenient truth.

https://i.imgur.com/ra1ix0n.png
https://8values.github.io/results.html?e=61.5&d=60.6&g=64.5&s=75.2

You’re welcome/I’m sorry. I cannot forget no matter how hard I try… 🫣

The universe has been around for 14 billion years, and I got to share this moment out of all 14 billion of those years with you.

Remember that (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞

Well, TIL: hate crimes are cool sometimes.

You want to kill people first and are looking for a cause second. Cringe edgelord.

You don’t need a state to give you permission for a just cause, idiot.

police and fellow neonazis

I feel like that’s redundant.

Killing a nazi only causes more problems.

“Kill Nazis” is a keyboard commando response to a more complex problem.

When your police departments and state legislatures and churches and clubs and mega-corps are all riddled with fascist partisans, there’s no magic bullet that makes them all go away. At some level, you need to cultivate relationships in your community. You need to be friends with your neighbors. You need to be able to find allies in these corrupted institutions who are open to reform. You need to be able to reach out to the lumpen proletariat - the unemployed, the homeless, the young and afraid - and bring them into your community to reinforce it.

Only when you’ve got a community that’s strong enough and unified enough to take on the fascist elements can you seriously talk about purging its worst elements. And once you’ve done the yeoman’s work of organizing your neighborhood for people’s mutual benefit, I think you’ll find a lot of that fascist sentiment melts away of its own accord - perhaps even transforms into revolutionary sentiment, as your neighbors stop seeing one another as evil outsiders and start seeing them as comrades.

I don’t disagree with your points about words, especially in one on one conversations, or rather small groups. In stuff like organized events, protests at places like women’s clinics etc, it gets a bit murky. Because the offense there isn’t just words, they are concerted efforts to intimidate people. Anti abortion activists will shout, heckle, and condemn women going into such clinics, even if they’re not there for abortion (most of these places, including Planned Parenthood, often a target) also provide just general health for women. Contraceptives, pregnancy testing and planning, STD education, treatment, testing, mental health concerns, wellness and preventative care.

By hindering access and intimidating people away, they are causing more harm than simply words, and so I think it’s right for people to counter protest. Not to punch them first or anything, but to show up in contrast of the bigots and in support of those who need the help. Not necessarily self defense, but still correct imo.

Finally, relying of law of the land is an easy barometer to use, but it only works if those laws are actually fair. In apartheid states like South Africa used to be, or the USA used to be, would you agree with the laws of self defense there? Where for instant someone of my skin color could never defend myself against a slave owner?

Many of the people you may be arguing with may not agree that the law adequately protects them. Some I may agree with, and some I may think is crazy. Many situations are nuanced and can’t be defined sown to a slogan or term. Lots of people who say “punch a nazi” don’t mean going down th> e street, finding and assaulting a nazi for no reason. They mostly mean be prepared to fight back, and don’t fall victim to the paradox of tolerance.