Kill Nazis but slowly

American thoughts on political violence

Captain America No. 1 hangs in a frame over my desk. Not the actual $2 million comic, just a copy of the cover showing Cap beating the hell out of Hitler. Published in December 1940, with a cover date of March 1941, this comic was such a success it outsold some of the major news magazines of the day including Time. In his book Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics, Les Daniels notes that Captain America’s monthly circulation approached 1 million. At the time, the circulation for the Sunday edition of all U.S. daily newspapers combined was slightly north of 30 million. Patriotic sentiment was a factor, as well as the rise of Nazi power. Hitler had become German chancellor and suspended civil liberties in 1933, the Nuremberg Laws removed Jewish citizenship in 1935, Kristallnacht was perpetrated in 1938 and the first prisoners arrived at Auschwitz in June 1940.

Another thing that made Captain America successful was artist Jack Kirby’s revolutionary style. Earlier comics often showed characters standing beneath big, boring speech bubbles. Action often consisted of a single panel followed by more dialogue. Kirby, who was born Jacob Kurtzberg to Austrian Jewish parents and who served in Europe during World War II, stretched the action over multiple panels, filling entire pages and connecting each frame play-by-play. He also drew more muscular characters with bolder lines and more dynamic movements. Whereas earlier comics had put all the drama in the words, Kirby put it in the fights.

Above my desk right next to that is another Captain America cover, the one where Cap the “Commie Smasher” is about to body slam a Soviet goon. These covers make a great pair, America’s two great enemies and the tails ends of the political spectrum.

When I was a kid, there were no greater evils than these. Satan himself had never killed a member of my family but Nazis and communists both had. Once, I wandered into my Russian grandfather Josef’s office where he sat at his desk, covered as it always was with engineering blueprints and piles of books. On his bookshelf there was a model of a T-38 Talon supersonic jet. It was the jet my father flew in the Air Force and it looked like the coolest toy I’d ever seen. I walked over and reached for it and grandpa snapped at me, something he’d never done before. My father explained that grandpa sometimes got confused. I would later learn that occasionally grandma woke in the middle of the night to find Josef hiding in the bathtub with his Army helmet on. Nobody used the term PTSD back then. But the look on his face when he snapped, the fear and confusion, I could not comprehend the horrors of Nazism and communism at that age but they had left their print on him, and I comprehended that.

This morning I finished an interview with an expert on neo-Nazism, soon to be published, and part of the conversation covered the question, what can regular folks do to combat this stuff? I looked up from my desk at the First Avenger clocking Adolf and remembered the old debate question, “Is it okay to punch a Nazi?”

In wartime my answer is yes, although I’ve heard some people say it depends. Like, what if the guy is not a true believer and just following orders? What if the guy is incredibly young? I have a story for this. One of my best friends, an Israeli, once told me his grandfather was hiding in a bombed-out city in Germany during the war when a young Nazi soldier found him. They fought and my friend’s grandfather managed to stab the young Nazi with the soldier’s own knife, killing the boy. When he told the story to my friend, he remarked how young the solider had been and my friend asked his grandfather, “Do you ever think about it?”

Every single day of my life, the old man replied.

“Do you have any regrets?”

Yes, said the old man. I regret I didn’t have more time to do it slowly.

That sums up my moral philosophy on dealing with Nazis in conflict, but what about during peacetime? What about when we see Nazis nonviolently protesting or marching down Main Street? In 2017, white nationalist Richard Spencer was sucker punched in the head while giving an interview on the sidewalk. I admit, the video is satisfying to watch.

But it also tugs at something uneasy in me. It must have done for others too because it sparked a national debate. The Conversation published an article titled “Is it OK to punch Nazis?,” in which Deakin University senior lecturer in philosophy Patrick Stokes argued, “Political violence … becomes legitimate in contexts when the liberal democratic sphere … has broken down — for instance, where tyranny makes certain forms of violent resistance effectively self-defense.”

So if Nazis take over your government or invade your country, you’ve got a moral green light to start swinging. Or shoot them. If possible, take your time. But this doesn’t address peaceful Nazis. Also in 2017, American journalist and Blocked and Reported host

Jesse Singal

wrote a piece for New York Magazine titled, “The Careful, Pragmatic Case Against Punching Nazis,” arguing:

Progressives almost always look for any possible nonviolent alternative … violence is seen as a last resort, in part because many progressives recognize that even if an individual act of it seems just, there are often long-term consequences that may not be immediately apparent … however, this mode of thinking seems to be evaporating … arguments that in any other context progressives would find laughable — You don’t think we should punch Nazis? So, what, you’re defending them? — are becoming more and more common.

I can attest to that. Singal goes on to say that we should let Nazis protest and rally while we focus on creating ever more inclusive and tolerant spaces. “This approach may not be as satisfying as punching Nazis,” he adds, “but it may increase the odds that in the future, there will be fewer Nazis to punch in the first place.”

Sadly, it feels like many on the left are increasingly choosing the less tolerant path and finding less and less value in those immortal words attributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

I’m obviously prone to have this impression after a leftist Twitter mob attacked me and sent me death threats, but I had the same sense watching similar events play out with others. The question is, is it generally true? To what extent has mainstream America accepted violence as a solution to political disagreements, and does this differ with left-wingers compared to right-wingers? First, we must remember that domestic terrorism in the United States is overwhelmingly a right-wing phenomenon. There were 85 extremist attacks resulting in death from September 12, 2001 to March 27, 2019, and far-right extremist groups were responsible for 73% of them.

But these are extremist groups. What I wanted to know is what the general American public thinks of political violence, and what I found is pretty disturbing.

A 2017 survey of free speech and tolerance by the Cato Institute found that 32% of Americans said it’s okay to punch a Nazi in the face. Answers differed by political affiliation, with most liberals saying it’s was okay and only about one-fifth of conservatives saying the same thing.

But if we take a closer look at those liberals, we find that about 56% of Democrats actually said it’s not okay. Most Republicans and most Democrats oppose political violence. But there are enough people on the far-left who support political violence that their responses shifted the average for liberals overall.

The survey also noted Millennials are twice as likely to approve of punching Nazis as people over 50 and that 45% of African Americans approve such violence compared to 35% of Latinos and 28% of whites. Strange that they didn’t have a separate category for Jews, who probably have something to say about the moral calculus of punching Nazis. Either way, the data clearly shows younger people and people of color, especially Black people, are more supportive. That makes sense because younger people tend to be temperamentally more aggressive than people over 50 and Black Americans are subjected to more discrimination, as well as discrimination of more extreme kinds, so you can imagine they would be less tolerant of such things.

An interesting question to ponder is, are conservatives as eager to punch communists as liberals are to punch Nazis? How strong is the “better dead than red” sentiment today? I myself admit to having some of these feelings. Both of these two evils have chopped limbs from my family tree. Earlier this week, I went down to Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle to pick up a new history on Soviet Russia and, on my way out, there was a parade of communists walking down the middle of the road, handing out Red Flag newspapers. Of course, if they had been neo-Nazis everyone in the vicinity would have been visibly disgusted. But I looked around and found most onlookers were ignoring them, waving at them or pleasantly interacting with them.

My Belarusian cousin called later the same day after hearing about my Seattle Times firing and we talked about my situation, the Lenin statue in Seattle and the communist parade I’d witnessed. We discussed the historical factors behind why Americans are so selectively outraged by communist versus fascist atrocities, and maybe I’ll do a write-up on that in the future, but my cousin was less interested in the how and why. He sneered in disgust and could not believe America was becoming a place where you’ve got Lenin statues, communist parades and journalists getting fired after criticizing socialist monsters. Spoiled leftist rich kids who have never tasted true communism or lost a loved one to it will walk around in Che T-shirts and talk about how Stalin was largely misunderstood and a friend of the Jews—yes, I actually had that conversation this past weekend. My cousin said he wished he could buy these people tickets to Belarus and pick up the conversation months later when they got back.

I looked for a survey more recent than 2017 and found one from July 2022 by the University of California, Davis, which asked respondents if they thought political violence is ever justified—and 20% said “yes.” A Dartmouth survey of 8,600 adults, also published in July, found that 20.5% of respondents would condone political violence in some cases. So that’s two surveys that both found about 20% of Americans condone political violence, and I guess the good news is that this number has come down from the 2017 survey citing 32%. On the other hand, 3% in the Dartmouth survey said they would always condone political violence. So if you thought the population is only about 1% psychopaths, you may want to update that impression.

But it gets even worse, because then respondents were asked who they would attack.

• 8.7% said a police officer

• 8.7% said a member of the military or National Guard

• 8.6% said an elected federal or state government official

• 7.7% said an elected local government official

• 6.5% said a person who does not share your political beliefs

• 6.4% said a public health official

• 5.8% said a person of another race or ethnicity

• 5.6% said an election worker such as a poll worker or vote counter

• 5.2% said a person who does not share your religion

There is a lot to chew on in those numbers. The anti-cop sentiment, the antidemocratic sentiment, the racism. I’m not trying to ruin your day, but it gets worse still. Respondents were also asked how they would carry out this violence.

• 18.5% said, “I will be armed with a gun”

• 9.9% said, “I will carry a gun openly, so that people know I am armed”

• 4% that “I will shoot someone with a gun”

The survey concluded, “these initial findings suggest a continuing alienation from and mistrust of American democratic society and its institutions, founded in part on false beliefs.”

A Reuters/Ipsos poll from September found that 17% of Americans somewhat or strongly agreed that political violence is acceptable, again with slightly more Democrats agreeing than Republicans. There are a lot of variables with these results and questions about how honest respondents are, as well as margins of error, so we can’t read these figures too literally and conclude that from July to September there was a real-world drop from 20% to 17% in support for political violence in the United States. But the overall trend from the 2017 survey does seem to be an uplifting one. This past June, States United Action surveyed 3,000 American adults and found that 78% of respondents see political violence as a problem. But it depends. For instance, 53% said they support violence if the government does not allow free elections whereas 34% said they support violence over abortion bans.

The survey also found, thank God, that most Americans reject violence against everyday people. So for instance, 78% said it is never okay to kill ordinary opponents. But that means 13% said it is okay, and 4% said it’s always okay. So you might argue that the prevalence of psychopathy is more like 3-4%.

Finally, a survey conducted this summer by the University of Chicago, reported by The Guardian, found that two and a half years after the January 6 attack on the Capitol roughly 12 million American adults, or 4.4% of the adult population, believe violence is justified to put Donald Trump back in the White House. I wonder if that’s the same 4% we were just talking about above.

It’s comforting to see support for political violence slowly in decline. Partisanship is making us more distrustful and more likely to resort to violence when we feel we have no legal recourse, and I think that helps explain what we saw on January 6. We need better policies for addressing job insecurity, food insecurity, housing insecurity and other things without which people end up in dire straits and some, feeling they have lost everything and that the system isn’t working for them, end up in the 4% who want to burn it all down and dance in the ruins.

I think sensible policies like these can appeal to both sides of the political spectrum. The left is big on addressing the needs of underserved communities and the right is big on building a strong middle class and raising the employment rate. We can find common ground. But first, both sides need to cut their fringes loose. The Republican Party is being dragged into the wilderness of QAnon idiocy and white nationalist dog whistles while the Democratic Party is reluctant to press “mute” on the woke ideologues who, as we’ve seen from the numbers above, tend to be more likely to overreact when people say things they don’t like.

We can get there, but right now both sides are going through an identity crisis, listening too much to the feral tails of the American bell curve. But those tails don’t represent who we as Americans truly are. Common folks are decent and fair-minded, and as Jack Kirby once said, “America is the home of the common man.”

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On occasion, the office where Jack Kirby worked in New York would sometimes receive phone calls and letters from Nazi sympathizers threatening the people responsible for creating Captain America. Once, Jack took a call and a man on the other end said there were three of them down in the lobby and that if he showed his face, they would teach him how real Nazis fight. “I’ll be right down,” he said, hung up the phone, rolled up his sleeves and headed to the lobby. By the time he got there, the cowards had fled.