When moderation fails : sometimes violence must be met with violence

... and following on nicely from the contention that liberals value fairness and care more than societal order, we have this.

Now we can all agree, I hope, that a mildly obnoxious remark should generally be countered with an opposing viewpoint, right ?
And we can all agree, I hope, that if your life is directly and immediately threatened by an actual Nazi, you're justified in the use of lethal force, right ?

Then the question becomes at what point the one must give way to the other. From ancient Greece to the modern era, democracy was born in blood and rebellion. Or as one historian put it, "lives or liberty ?". Sometimes you can't have both. There have been times, rightly or wrongly, when nations have scarified huge numbers of lives for the sake of liberty, and others (such as below) when life is seen as paramount.


Harassing political opponents is fully American and American history is full of it. If my ideological ancestors did not harass their political opponents, I would still be enslaved. I would still be segregated by law. I would still be one traffic stop away from death without any sustained movement insisting that my black life matters.

Today’s moderates still view confrontations as threats. They write things like, “Let us meet hate with love,” as the ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd tweeted Monday morning. “Let us meet bullying with an embrace. Let us meet vulgarity with civility. This is how our country and world win.” They imagine, like Dowd, that they are following “the path of Martin Luther King, Mandela, Gandhi.” They imagine, like the CNN political analyst David Gergen, that “the civil-rights movement” was “much more civil in tone.”

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion,” King wrote, “that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is … the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/incivility/563963/