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Comment by DaniloDias | Hacker News Reader

Have you read the rise and Fall of the Third Reich?

I appreciate your perspective on the incubation period of nazi Germany- but I think you are floating over some important events. These ‘brown shirts’ were citizen volunteer believers who evolved into a kind of political pressure group hitler could direct around. They would harass towns, intervene at businesses, assault and eventually murder people. They were not a part of the nation’s legitimate police force at the beginning of hitler’s rise, but as he acquired power, so did they.

Do you reject the idea that there no parallels to the black bloc and the brown shirts behavior? Motivations are obviously not the same, but the behavior sure looks like it. Where does “Rules for radicals” fit in your perspective?

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> Do you reject the idea that there no parallels to the black bloc and the brown shirts behavior?

Yes. It's very clear that organised violence in the US is overwhelmingly from the far right. Anyone denying this either isn't paying attention or is being dishonest.

Persuade me with documentation.

From the source:

"In analyzing fatalities from terrorist attacks, religious terrorism has killed the largest number of individuals—3,086 people—primarily due to the attacks on September 11, 2001, which caused 2,977 deaths.10 The magnitude of this death toll fundamentally shaped U.S. counterterrorism policy over the past two decades. In comparison, right-wing terrorist attacks caused 335 deaths, left-wing attacks caused 22 deaths, and ethnonationalist terrorists caused 5 deaths."[1]

[1]https://www.csis.org/analysis/escalating-terrorism-problem-u...

According to a 2017 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office [1] "of the 85 violent extremist incidents that resulted in death since September 12, 2001, right-wing violent extremist groups were responsible for 62 (73 percent) while radical Islamist violent extremists were responsible for 23 (27 percent). The total number of fatalities is about the same for far right-wing violent extremists and radical Islamist violent extremists over the approximately 15-year period (106 and 119, respectively). However, 41 percent of the deaths attributable to radical Islamist violent extremists occurred in a single event—an attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016."

In 2018, most ideologically motivated murders in the United States of America were linked to right-wing extremism [2].

As of 2020, right-wing terrorism accounted for the majority of terrorist attacks and plots in the US[3] and has killed more people in the continental United States since the September 11 attacks than Islamic terrorism [4].

[1] https://www.gao.gov/assets/690/683984.pdf

[2] https://www.adl.org/murder-and-extremism-2018

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/27/us-far-right-v...

[4] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/right-wing-terro...

> Motivations are obviously not the same

You said it yourself. The political content of protests matters. Why not parallel with the Hong Kong protestors?

The brownshirts were paramilitaries operating in the open, in defense of the existing power structure. More in parallel to the KKK. After the ascent of Hitler, the police were explicitly forbidden from interfering with the assaults and murders.

I wrote this in response to your previous post, which was flagged:

I don't think this rioting, violence, and general unrest should be compared to the Brown Shirts. Groups engaging in "antagonism and murder towards people they perceived as evil" are not uncommon in history. An analogy to the Nazis in the 30s seems out of place because, as you say, of everything that the Nazis did after the 30s.

If you want to talk to about ideologues, people for whom the ends justify the means, people who are willing to engage in violence and destruction for ideological goals, then you can make a comparison here. You can put the Brown Shirts in this category, you can put current rioters in this category, you can put a large number of historical groups in this category, and I think this categorization is fair. (Note that sometimes this violence may even be justified).

But why pick the Nazis in particular for your comparison? Comparing this group or that group to the Nazis is almost always rhetorical trick precisely because of the Holocaust. Why not pick some other group in history that used violence to pursue its ideological goals but didn't boil over into a genocide? The answer is that, if you picked another group, the rhetorical power of the comparison would be lost. But it would be a more honest comparison.

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