In movies, punching is the way to deal with Nazis. Reality is more complicated.
In Hollywood movies, Nazis are easy villains. They’re up there with cruel slaveholders and the Soviets — at least during the Cold War — and on the big screen, there’s only one way to deal with such dastardly evil-doers: physical violence.
Nazis get scalped in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” and mangled by an airplane propeller in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” A comic book Captain America famously KOed Hitler, and the Dirty Dozen (or what was left of them) dispatched a chateau of high-ranking German officers.
We’ve seen it so many times before that our reactions are instinctive, no matter the brutality. When Nazis go down, our spirits lift. Theaters full of people clap and whoop. Movies have taught generations of film-goers to revel in righteous violence.
Things are a little more complicated in the real world.
In the last weeks there have been a couple of high-profile incidents that we can file under the general category of “violence against Nazis,” to keep things simple. The first happened during Donald Trump’s inauguration when Richard Spencer, the man who coined the phrase “alt-right,” was punched in the face while giving a television interview on the streets of D.C. Spencer claims he isn’t a Nazi, though he’s a white supremacist who longs for an ethno-state and wants to ban interracial marriage, so feel free to use whatever term you see fit. (He prefers identitarian.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2017/02/01/in-movies-punching-is-the-way-to-deal-with-nazis-reality-is-more-complicated/?utm_term=.00c4cf319b64&wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1
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