Social media can be hugely deceptive in judging how popular ideas are. One side can be noisy while the people who disagree feel too intimidated to dissent. An example is the self-declared “Nazi punchers.” They’re self-righteous in their advocacy of violence, and they like to distort a footnote of Karl Popper’s into a “paradox of tolerance” that says they must be intolerant to be tolerant. But we don’t routinely see news reports of assaults of this kind, which is a clue that they’re more noise than action or few in numbers. Probably both.
A while back, a filk event used an access code that read like an exhortation to that kind of violence. (I’m trying to avoid being specific, though I don’t think the code is still being used.) I said on my Filk News account on Bluesky that I would not help to publicize the event and stated the reason. Someone objected, asking what the point of entering World War II was if he couldn’t beat up people. I blocked him.
At Philcon last weekend, someone sang a song using “Punch Nazis” as a refrain. I walked out of the room for the duration of the song. It bothered me enough that at 2 AM, I took my iPad, holding it under the bed covers so I wouldn’t disturb my roommate, and drafted a song in reply. Here it is, with a few fixes and a CC license notice:
Friends, Not These Sounds
Lyrics: Gary McGath, Copyright 2025
Licensed under CC-BY-ND/4.0
Music: Beethoven, “Ode to Joy”
Some sing songs promoting violence,
Songs that say their fists will win.
Singing how they are so righteous,
Urging beatings with a grin.
Such songs don’t belong among us.
Brute force ’gainst ideas is wrong.
If you think it shows your virtue,
I don’t want to hear your song.
There are people who believe the
First Amendment just applies
To ideas that they approve of,
And they think they are so wise.
They’re as bad as those they’re fighting,
Or perhaps they’re viler still,
Once they say, “Let’s punch some Nazis,”
Who’ll be next to cross their will?
If you say “Let’s beat the bums up,”
is that going to satisfy?
Charlie Kirk or Brian Thompson,
People cheering as they died.
I believe that we are better,
Thugs are not what we should be.
Don’t become the thing you’re fighting.
Let’s reject brutality.
I sang it to a small group on Sunday, wondering what kind of reaction I’d get. The person whose song I was answering wasn’t there, but the audience liked it! I learned that I wasn’t the only person who had objected to the bad-taste access code. Since then I’ve posted it on a private Discord and gotten just positive reactions (so far) there was well.
More people than I had realized understand that vigilante violence against speech, even when it comes from real or imagined Nazis, is a bad idea. I wouldn’t have known this if I hadn’t written and sung the song. If you like it, feel free to sing it; in the unlikely event you think you can make money from it, talk to me first.
The song title, by the way, refers to the words the baritone soloist sings in Beethoven’s 9th before the setting of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.”