why I'm not on board with the whole "punching Nazis" thing

The rise of Trump has been accompanied by an increasingly emboldened far right. It started, or at least came to my attention, first in the guise of big mouths like Milo Yiannopoulos (yes I know he's British but America gave him the platform) who taunted lefties and the feminists. Then there were some guys in suits whose names I can't recall but who definitely had more of disturbing sort of White Supremacist agenda. More recently we had actual Nazis marching in Charlottesville with the KKK garb and the flying of flags with swastikas on them. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on the American south culture and politics, but that's some fucked up shit there that America has never kicked over.

I concern myself here with the British left's reaction to all this, specifically the far left. There has been a general cheering on from the British far left of the American far left who have the idea that we rid society of these disturbing elements by punching them. Punch a Nazis. It's become a familiar phrase on social media.

I didn't like it from the start. My thoughts were that if you went around punching Nazis then you better be prepared for when they started punching back. This was eventually born out by the ugly scenes in Charlottesville. If the left brings social discourse down lower than the Nazis, then the Nazis will surely follow and then drag us all down to hell. 

If you want a depressing vision of the future imagine the far left and the far right going at each other with baseball bats forever. 

But since then, my opposition to "punching Nazis" has grown on two further accounts. The first is that the far left have started defining "Nazis" loosely and widely. Strictly speaking of course, a Nazis is a member of the National Socialist German Worker's Party, which no longer exists. Today we might use the word Nazis interchangeably with the word fascist - a right wing authoritarian ideologist opposed to democracy and liberalism. That's a pretty specific type of "politics" right there. But I see all over social media that getting lumped in with these specific political types by the far left are anyone who doesn't agree with the far left. So, for instance, if you don't like the fact that Antifa set fire to things on demos and smash up shops, you are now a Nazis. If you express an opinion that there are better ways to fight the rise of White Nationalism than punching one doing a TV interview, then you're a Nazis. If you don't like Jeremy Corbyn - Nazis. Don't think we should punch a Nazis - NAZIS!

So it's become not so much Punch a Nazis, as Punch Anyone Who is Not Far Left, which is the vast majority of British citizens.

This authoritarian stance by the far left that anyone who disagrees with the far left must be punched, looks a bit Nazis to me. But this irony is lost on them. The far left have never been known for their self-awareness. In any case, however you wish to define this lust for violence against people with a different opinion to you, no good can come of it.

The other reason I have a growing dislike of the Punch a Nazis narrative is that the far left appear to have got the current crop of fascists mixed up with the Third Reich. There is some very obvious masturbatory fantasies going on here, with some prominent commentators in national newspapers having dry wanks over getting to fight the Nazis like Granddad did. The left has some idea that it, and it alone, defeated the Third Reich, and with the idea that it might get to do it again, it feels purposeful, and masterful, and hard. Leaving aside the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which should be a matter of embarrassment for anyone on the far left, but never is, most people who fought the Third Reich were not lefties. And the Third Reich were not a group of sad tossers who got outnumbered 10 to 1 at a rally in Boston. 

If I recall my history correctly, we were actually at war with the Third Reich, who were doing considerably more than expressing some disturbing opinions, and every act of violence committed against them by the Allies was in a desperate attempt to kill a regime that wanted to enslave all of Europe. They didn't bomb Dresden because they posted some upsetting memes.

What has lately become a further concern is that far left commentators suddenly and in unison, almost as if they were taking direction from some creepy, apologist-for-Putin, communications director, decided to launch an attack on "centrists". "Centrists" has become the new name for anyone who does not support Stalin or Hitler. The centre ground of British politics is generally speaking where the votes are these days. Tony Blair dominated the centre ground so completely that he won three consecutive elections, two of them landslide, one of them after a disastrous foreign war. And what was more, he and his cabinet dragged the centre ground to the left so comprehensively that liberal and progressive politics became mainstream and the cultural norm.    

I would describe my politics as left-of-centre. The "left" being as important to me as the "centre". I believe that by the strength of our common endeavours we achieve more than we achieve alone.

But recently some prominent left wing commentators took to social media, and national newspapers, to call me and my fellow travellers, if not actual Nazis, then Nazis Enablers. The new narrative went that us "centrists" had been arguing for years that Nazis should be given a voice, and that our particular brand of politics was dangerous because its sensible and balanced approach to modern life made us uniquely unable to tackle extremist politics.

They often quote Desmond Tutu about staying neutral putting you on the side of the oppressor, as if "centrists" have no opinions or solutions about social injustice, dictatorships or extremism, the implication being that we care only about maintaining the status quo and nothing else.

Only they! The righteous Nazis Punching left! Could take on the neo-Nazis and win! 

More masturbatory fantasy, but this time with a strong streak of projection. Somewhere, in the broken and blasted parts of the far left collective brain, they know that if anyone is responsible for the rise of the Nazis, it is they. The left have screamed and accused and threatened to punch, sack or otherwise destroy any person who dared raise a reasonable argument against whatever the left decided to get offended about this week - leaving the political landscape wide open for Nazis to walk right onto.   

The far left need Nazis. Since socialism was left behind by modern life and the centre ground of progressive liberalism dominated mainstream society, the far left have found themselves redundant. A hero needs it's monster to fight, otherwise it's not a hero, and the far left needed to resurrect an old enemy to find its potency again. The far left can only exist when there is an active and visible far right and until very recently, there wasn't one.

But there is now. And the far left are wetting themselves with glee at getting to punch Nazis. Meanwhile Europeans are regularly being knifed, run over and blown up, and the Jews once again targeted for murder, by terrorists signed up to an Islamic fascist ideology that oddly gets a complete free pass from the far left. The far left only want to punch the right kind of Nazis, Nazis whose hatred comes from an assumed superiority of the white race. The Nazis who base their hatred on the assumed superiority of their religion however, we don't punch them. If they blow up children coming out of a pop concert or hack at people as they sip pints outside pubs on balmy evenings, well then we come up with a complicated and reductive political equation that excuses and minimises their behaviour, which also has an added bonus of allowing their hateful and dangerous extremism to flourish in democratic and liberal societies.

The fact that the far left will define centrists as Nazis and Nazis enablers, but not the followers of a blatant fascist ideology that is actively pursuing the total destruction of democracy and liberalism, tells us all we need to know about the far left's true agenda. The far left is packed with disingenuous, authoritarian thugs and troublemakers and we trust them at our peril.