So I had someone say to me yesterday, in response to this thread, that it was a strawman because we all agree that being reaching out in dialogue to Nazis is bad. A couple things on that.
(We absolutely don't all agree that reaching out in dialogue to Nazis is bad. But let's set that aside.)
The thing with this kind of response is that it reads the point of the comparison backwards—it's not that attitudes toward Nazis are settled now that makes it interesting, but that attitudes WEREN'T settled then.
It's often easy to know—or think you know—what side of a historical debate you'd have been on, precisely because that debate has been resolved, at least among your peer group.
But when you go back in history and look at what people were saying in the moment, when they didn't know how the story they were living ended, now-dead disputes suddenly spring back to life.
This is what I was getting at with the thread below, which got a lot of people mad at me last year—that what's self-evident about a political stance in retrospect is often much murkier in real time.
As I said this morning at #HxA2018, it's a lot easier to praise the Berkeley Free Speech Movement when the cop car the activists are using as a podium exists only in grainy old photos.
Oops. Just realized that I failed to link to yesterday's discussion at the top of this one. Here's the thread I'm referencing in these tweets:
