Summary
A group of masked men with Nazi flags protested outside a performance of “The Diary of Anne Frank” in Howell, Michigan, shouting antisemitic slurs.
Audience members were reportedly frightened and needed escorts to their cars. The Fowlerville Community Theatre, which staged the play, described the protesters’ presence as a disturbing reminder of the fear faced by Holocaust victims.
The Anti-Defamation League condemned the display. The incident follows other recent displays of racism in the area.
There are lots of examples of reformed white supremacists/nazis/racists. Like I said, it’s hard work, not saying it’s easy. My grandparents also escaped Europe, dropping family members off in any country that would take them before ending up in the US. The trauma is in my blood, so I get the impulse to want violent revenge. But I firmly believe that in order to learn anything from the horrors of WWII, we firstly have to avoid violence at any cost. Otherwise we’re just making the same mistake they did, while trying to fix their mistakes. It won’t work.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/26/opinion/sunday/why-i-left-white-nationalism.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/books/review/eli-saslow-rising-out-of-hatred.html
https://jewishpostandnews.ca/features/the-cure-for-hate-how-a-former-neo-nazi-skinhead-turned-his-life-around/
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-54526345
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/from-neo-nazi-to-hasidic-jew-former-skinhead-who-discovered-his-jewish-roots-to-speak-in-montreal
Those might not be the best examples, they’re not particularly easy to find, because it’s hard work and relatively rare. But it’s possible, and I’d argue the hard work is worth it to avoid violence.
I’m not saying people can’t be reformed, clearly they can, no argument there.
My point is that Naziism itself, or basically any authoritarian/fascist-esque government, has never been stopped without violence. In fact it’s so rare that one of the only times it happened we named it the Velvet Revolution and it required the collapse of the entire Soviet Union to prompt it.
(The rest of this is about the US, but can apply elsewhere. I’m going to use American examples due to the subject of this post, but it does apply virtually everywhere now.)
This is systemic at this point; the president of the United States is a fascist. The government will now be fascist. And as much as I like the idea of reforming each individual person, how exactly do you think that is going to play out in the US as it is today? The left in the US is extremely shy and pre-defeated. They don’t demonstrate in huge numbers, they don’t come together, they don’t reach out to other groups on a national scale and defend each other. Hell, members of the DNC immediately blamed ‘woke politics’ for their loss, and are completely out of touch with reality. Women/2SLGBTQ+/minorities of any kind now have no official party that fully backs them. So the idea we’re going to get a handful of LARPing dickless Nazi fanbois to change their tune and have that be the feel good story just won’t cut it anymore.
I’m not saying people have to go commit random acts of violence. I’m saying that the government has been co-opted. There’s no legal system to rely on any more. Women are going to need fucking Green Books for going from state-to-state. People in the US have already collectively shrugged when a school or gay club are shot up, imagine what they’ll be like now with Trump and his cronies in charge with the full Project 2025 narrative.
What I am saying is, in the time it would take you to reform these people 20 times their number will be created. If you’re a woman, LGBT, a minority, you need to come together and decide how you’re going to survive this. Is it make no noise, wait it out, hope staying hidden helps? Or is it get out there in numbers and challenge authority? What do you do with people in your community who are ‘traitors’ and tell those Nazi’s where to find the black woman hiding, the boy who came out to his parents and was chased out of the house with violence?
Those men standing there, waving Nazi fucking flags weren’t stopped. They weren’t arrested, they weren’t fined, the legal system thinks that waving the flag of a belief system that says only certain kind of humans should be allowed to live is okay, because they ‘deserve’ the freedom to do so, but women don’t have the freedom to control their bodies. That’s the system the US is now.
Good luck reforming them, I wish you the best, and I’m so sad at what is about to happen down there.
If you are from the US, need to flee, and are in the PNW, please DM me. I’ll do what I can to help you.