Neo-Nazis are trying to spread hatred through comedy. This isn’t funny - Guardian

19/12/2017

Neo-Nazis are trying to spread hatred through comedy. This isn’t funny

Tauriq Moosa

It’s never OK to laugh at racist jokes – this is how neo-Nazi websites, such as the Daily Stormer, try to normalise their message

@tauriqmoosa

Wednesday 20 December 2017 00.05 AEDT Last modified on Wednesday 20 December 2017 00.07 AEDT

“The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not.” So states the writing guide of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. As expressly outlined by the leaked guide, the goal is to make the site’s ideas digestible, palatable and visible to those outside its toxic sphere. By muddying the waters of Nazis’ hate, a greater number will drink.

While none of this is surprising to those of us who have been targets of Nazis and the alt-right, it’s useful to have their goals so plainly, if disgustingly, outlined. It helps show media sites contemplating profiles of white supremacists – like Mother Jones or the New York Times – that they’re only aiding them by putting forward their unchallenged ideas.

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And it’s also important as it reveals how Nazis use satire, humour or “lolz” as partial immunity for their hate, allowing them tolerance from those who would (or should) otherwise repudiate it. As the guide states: “Packing our message inside of … humour can be viewed as a delivery method. Something like adding cherry flavour to children’s medicine.”

If you’re a person of colour, this might already strike a familiar chord: you’ve no doubt experienced bigotry from supposedly not racist people in the form of “humour” or “satire”. By placing bigotry in such a shell many white people seem to believe they can’t or shouldn’t be criticised. As the Daily Stormer guide says: “When using racial slurs, it should come across as half-joking – like a racist joke that everyone laughs at …”

If you’ve ever been the only person of colour at a social gathering, you’ll know what it’s like when a casual racist joke arises. “Everyone” laughs because of power dynamics, not the joke’s genius. People of colour have been told not to be hypersensitive throughout our lives, that it’s just humour, don’t be a wet sock, it’s just words, and so on. When white people wield the conch of humour, people of colour are supposed to just endure the racism that comes out and laugh at the humour encasing it. This is the model neo-Nazis view as fertile ground for spreading hate.

Bigotry obtaining immunity under the banner of humour is so widespread, there’s even a popular card game called Cards Against Humanity, centred on that premise. (The company even refers to it as “a party game for horrible people”.) This stepping over lines of decency is boastingly called being “politically incorrect” or “ironic racism”. Too many people have convinced themselves that such humour is daring for targeting marginalised groups, or somehow sending those who “do it for real”. This is exactly what neo-Nazis want. It’s lifted directly from their writing guide to make hatred digestible, to spread it via normalisation and tolerance, via claims of humour’s immunity.

Many white people have told me, sometimes proudly, that they mock all races, thus outlining a belief we’ve moved beyond racial inequality. But we haven’t: just ask the neo-Nazis and white supremacists marching openly in America’s streets, calling for the death of a group of people who aren’t like them.

Donald Trump built his platform on this idea of stepping on so-called political correctness – without really saying what the term meant. As Adam Serwer writes in a powerful essay for the Atlantic: “What Trump’s supporters refer to as political correctness is largely the result of marginalised communities gaining sufficient political power to project their prerogatives on to society at large. What a society finds offensive is not a function of fact or truth, but of power.”

It’s not that these jokes are suddenly offensive, but that marginalised groups have a little more power to be heard. Many would rather complain about “political correctness” than wonder if they might be wrong. Here’s a hint: if your view aligns with a neo-Nazi writing guide, it’s probably wrong.

It’s too easy not to care about words, jokes and actions when you’re not the one affected by it. While I’m glad most white people seem to passionately oppose Nazis, that’s not a particularly high moral bar to pass. If you believe that Nazi ideology should be opposed, you can’t just ignore the way this ideology is spread. And normalisation through humour is a key part of that.

People cannot get immunity because they couch their slurs in humour or because they believe they’re not racist, sexist or transphobic. Intention doesn’t equal reality, especially when it’s a reality lived by people unlike you. We should all be trying to figure out what counts as hurtful so we can avoid it in ourselves and use our own privilege to call it out when we see it.

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That’s not oversensitivity, it’s that for far too long marginalised people’s concerns weren’t factored in. Now that our concerns are heard more, it undermines the status quo of whose considerations matter. Privileged people could continue their lives unaffected by whether their jokes hurt others. As Serwer noted in the same essay, this disjunctive alignment of consideration is why Trump is more outraged over kneeling athletes than murdered black children. Only one of those categories affects him and his base.

You may not be racist, but attempts to be funny cannot give you permission to say bigoted things for effect. It’s the foot in the door true bigots need to make their hate palatable and widespread. As Louise Mirrer, the president and CEO of the New York Historical Society, noted about Nazis normalising antisemitism in children’s books: “You kind of lose the capacity to feel appalled. And then you just believe it.”

There are no such things as monsters, only people who hold monstrous beliefs. They weren’t born with those views. Someone spread them. And now we have access to a modern Nazi playbook on how they do it.

Hatred should not be normalised and only we can prevent it. The Daily Stormer uses our complacency as fertile ground to further its agenda. It’s time we learned how the seeds of hatred are spread so we can stop them from blooming.

• Tauriq Moosa is a South African writer focusing on ethics, justice, tech and pop culture