Should You Kill or Mourn Nazis and Commies? (Charlie Kirk Edition)
By Ian Welsh On September 11, 2025
But Charlie wasn’t just a one-note ideological thinker.
I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”
Kirk was, needless to say, all for the Gaza genocide, but he was for it by lying about it. Most famously, he denied starvation in Gaza.
Anyway, Kirk was an evil, pro-genocide douchebag, who was shot, which he said was an acceptable price to pay for the second amendment. I’m not going to waste crocodile tears on someone who actively worked for the mass murder of civilians and who died in a way he thought was an acceptable sacrifice.
But we need to unpack this properly. One thing commenters on the right have been saying is that Charlie may have died, in full of in part, because of neo-liberals and the left calling him and people like him Nazi or fascist.
Now I don’t know the motives of who killed him, but in our society many people do genuinely believe that killing Nazis was justified and the right way to deal with them. There’s a version that swings left, of course. “The only good Commie, is a dead Commie.” The Black Book of Communism and the constant reminders of deaths under Mao and Stalin are meant to justify this sort of hatred, as reminders of the Holocaust and German war crimes are to justify killing Nazis.
So the right isn’t wrong. If you call someone a Nazi there’s a certain subtext where “and killing him would be justified” is implied. Fascist is weaker, but same general idea.
But the reverse version is Communist/Marxist/Socialist. The right calls their enemies this all the time and it has the same implication. “Cultural Marxist” was the battle cry used by people like Kirk to justify purges of the university system of left wing professors.
I don’t want to imply these are mirror phenomena. The fact is that since the early 20th century being Communist, Marxist or Socialist has been much more likely get one fired, jailed, deported, beaten or killed than being a fascist. Indeed, there was a huge taboo against calling anyone a Nazi, so much so that doing so was considered “losing the argument.”
It took a lot of boundary pushing in the right for that taboo to be partially broken.
Back in 2016, during Trump’s first run for the Presidency, I wrote that constantly calling him a fascist or Nazi, and branding resistance ANTIFA would naturally lead to violence, because if someone is a Nazi, violence isn’t just justified to stop them, it’s a moral imperative to use any means necessary including violence to oppose them.
But in America, the same is true of stopping Communism or socialism or Marxism. And the same is true of calling Abortion a holocaust.
So what’s happened here is that the shoe is now on both feet. The right had their Commies and their abortion Holocaust to justify their actions. Now the center has Nazis and the left has Nazis and the Gaza genocide to justify their violence.
By their lights, all three sides are justified in violence. If Commies and Nazis and Genocide are true evil, and if all sides have committed genocides and are Nazis (right) and Commies (left/center) then, indeed, it is ethically required to use any means necessary to stop them.
What we’re seeing right now is a cry from all the “responsible people” of “don’t resort of political violence! It’s never justified!” (This in a country formed by violent revolution, who’s almost always mass murdering people for political reasons.)
But the issue is that the right and, actually, the center, are acting like fascists, at the least, and really like Nazis. (That whole inconvenient genocide thing.)
The right’s case is weaker, unless you do view abortion as a Holocaust, in which case, yes, you are hard pressed not to find yourself wondering why you aren’t murdering the abortionists. Neoliberals aren’t left wing, socialists or communist and there are no socialists or communists anywhere near power in the US. The right calls neoliberals the left and pretends “cultural Marxism” is Marxism, so they’re really Stalinists, which is ludicrous to anyone who knows the politically correct crew that the right calls “cultural Marxists.”
If you want avoid domestic political violence over these issues (though it’s all really a proxy for the impoverishment of the majority of the population) you either have to decide that being a Nazi (pro genocide, pro gestapo/ICE thugs) is OK, or stop being a Nazi. On the other side, you have to give up abortion or decide that it isn’t a Holocaust. And since “cultural Marxism” is really proxy for a series of policies meant to help women and various racial and sexual minorities, you have to decide whether prejudice, including legal prejudice against them is OK (Issue one) and whether or not they deserve any sort of helping hand (a separate issue. You could keep them legally equal and let them keep their rights like gay marriage and the female vote but get rid of affirmative action and so on.)
Ian Welsh
Nazis and neo-Nazis are more acceptable in the West now, Netanyahu and his followers tried to shift responsibility and blame for the Final Solution from Hitler to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. I remember the news articles before the Russia-Ukraine war covering the National Guard training of Ukrainian neo-Nazis which contained some criticism. For a time there was coverage of extremist Muslim militias by the US military and allied governments, but that was whitewashed by calling them "moderates". Even after their image has been reformed, they're massacring Alawites in Syria. |
