Heckles

Illustration: Brennan Bova
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Stop defending Nazis

More and more each day the world we live in feels like Gotham City. But unlike the fictional Batman metropolis, the villains we face are real—and boy, are they scary.

The latest in a long line of events sure to make your blood boil is the resurgence of Nazism, and it’s happening in our own backyards, just south of the border. To recap, on Friday, Aug. 11 and Saturday, Aug. 12, a white supremacist rally called “Unite the Right” met at the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville to protest the city’s decision to remove a statue depicting General Robert E. Lee.

The group was made up of members hurling racist, anti-black slurs, bearing Tiki torches, waving swastika-laden flags, performing Nazi salutes and chanting Nazi slogans. To put it more succinctly, this was a group of Nazis.

Counter-protesters took to the streets to oppose the white supremacists. Many members of the opposition were injured, and one was killed by a vehicle intentionally driven into the crowd by a radical white terrorist.

While the events that took place on Saturday were devastating to say the least, what’s worse is the mixed reactions from people concerning Unite the Right. Instead of rightful condemnation of these terrible acts of violence, President Trump insisted there were “many sides” to the issue, even going so far as to lay blame on the “alt-left” for inciting violence and claiming that “there are many fine people on both sides.”

This is an outrage. It’s ridiculous that there are people who even consider this a debate, and it’s even more ridiculous hearing this from the president of the United States. What happened on Saturday is not some goofy protest by a bunch of silly white frat boys, it was an act of domestic terrorism, and needs to be condemned as such.

No one blinks an eye at unfairly labelling all 1.6 billions Muslims as terrorists after the actions of a handful of radicals, or attempting to criminalize Black Lives Matters activists, resulting in violence and hatred towards these marginalized groups. However, when an active group of literal Nazis takes to the streets with torches, shouting things like “Blood and Soil” and bearing swastika-laden flags, suddenly everyone is concerned with being politically correct.

If you are someone who is saying that “Nazi” is not the correct term for these people then you are part of the problem. In fact, you are just as ignorant as the people spouting the lines about “not all men…” and “all lives matter.”

Stop propagating hate crimes under the guise of free speech. It is with sadness and disbelief that I write this article, but I sincerely hope that humanity will get it together enough to move past this sudden backtrack in history, and fight to reclaim the rights of the people being so viciously attacked for simply existing.

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