Hello, I am new here and I'd like to see your point of view on violence and antifascism, especially in the wake of recent events. (By the way, this isn't really related, but I just read the introductory guide and it explained the basic concepts better than anything I read before, especially the relationship between the state and capital, really good job on that)
First, the Richard Spencer incident. I am not at all morally opposed to the punch itself, and it felt very cathartic to see the nazi driven off. But how practical is it? I know that he himself said that they "can't have a public movement" if they're in constant fear of such incidents, but should we take the nazi's word for it? He knows what he says is publicly available, so it seems foolish to genuinely, openly say how best to oppose them. Maybe I'm giving him too much credit by assuming some kind of reverse psychology on his part, but it seems to me open violence like that scares people and makes them more sympathetic to him.
Secondly, on a larger scale, waging war on fascist, totalitarian regimes. Recently I saw some left wing people denounce Americans who during WW II opposed invading Nazi Germany, calling them nazi sympathisers. On the other hand, the Left was pretty unanimously opposed to the Iraq war. Saddam Hussein's regime was responsible for deaths oh hundreds of thousands, they used poisonous gas on Kurds. Now I know this isn't the reason USA invaded Iraq, but can't the same be said of Nazi Germany? They attacked only after years of war, Stalin's urging and after Hitler declared war on USA in the first place. Is the difference in approach between the two based on scale and power relation?
If you ask me any fascist is fair game for violence as they intend to inflict violence on those they dislike. Conflict and violence is a core tenet of what they believe in and when they are not actually harming people they are whipping up hate for others to harm people.
As for the other point about war, I'm not sure I can answer it properly as it's probably rather complicated but I'll say this-
I think those two wars are perhaps different, in that it would have been easier to support the uprising against Saddam in 1991 and doing that would have been a better way of dealing with him- but that didn't happen. As you say, Hitler declared war on the US first, where as Saddam had no intention of picking a fight with them, he didn't attack america. However, an ally of Nazi Germany did attack the US. I guess the US could have intervened in some way against nazi germany or the spanish fascists but they didn't do that. I personally think the best way of dealing with these fascist regimes would be to support their enemies at points where they were weak but the US had vested interest in not doing that in both cases. I guess I come across here as somewhat of a believer in my enemies' enemy is my friend, which really I'm not but what I've stated is the only way I can think of dealing with these regimes effectively. In the case of Iraq it is easier to do as there is an actual uprising to get behind. In the case of germany, the nazis would have had to be dealt with either before or just after they gained power, something an anti-fascist Red Army could have perhaps dealt with had Lenin not died, or had Stalin not taken over. We don't know what would have happened though. I'm not a pacifist, I think violence is a necessary part of struggle, especially when it comes to fascists of all types.