To the people saying stop using the term Nazi there were people in "camp auschwitz" shirts and "6 million wasn't enough" tattoos (referring to the number of Jewish people killed). There absolutely were Nazis in the streets.

I'm disappointed in github for their actions and in the HN community that I see people defending Nazis.

Also, FWIW, this is what 20,000 American Nazis in Madison Square Garden in 1939 looks like. Nazi, white supremacist, neo-confederate, all the same thing, all in America. Complacency and nit-picking verbiage will only make them stronger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC1MNGFHR58

What is Github's side of the story?

It’s not being used flippantly. There’s literal nazis running amok. With literal swastikas, SS symbols, derivative names. For years. Deeply embedded and actively organizing the mobs like we saw last week. Ran around chanting “Jews will not replace us” and murdered a woman with a Dodge Charger. Where have you been?

Yes, when you're Jewish and there's an armed mob of white supremacists on the street, the last thing we want to do is insult them by improper classification.

two wrongs don,t make a right.

"Hey, are you guys totally committed to the 25-point program of the NSDAP or you guided more by Simmons' ABC of the Invsible Empire? I gotta make sure I check the right box."

I was curious, so I did a GIS for "capitol riot [nazi] flags" and was unable to find any pictures of people flying actual Nazi flags. There may have been more subtle things, like an article mentioned "stickers" but I didn't see anything I could identify. There was the guy with the "Auschwitz" shirt.

People did fly the Confederate flag though, so "white supremacists" seems beyond a reasonable doubt.

I guess I owe someone an apology then, I wouldn’t want to malign the Klan by equating them with Nazis.

By reducing them to this label, you are doing the same thing as them.

Yes, what I am doing is completely equivalent to actually forming an angry armed mob, and actually ransacking a building while chanting actual death threats against public officials.

I am not especially concerned about what kind of white supremacists people were.

But if it would be significant that people were flying actual Nazi flags, then it must also be significant if they weren't. To some extent. Other demonstrations did have such flags.

This is an example of a more general pattern that's been bothering me recently. It seems like a contradiction to claim that something is a heinous offense, while simultaneously claiming it doesn't matter whether a given person or entity is really guilty or not. This is saying that guilt is and isn't important at the same time.

It's absolutely ridiculous that anyone would argue that calling white supremacists "Nazis" is as bad as supporting the ideology of white supremacy. One is semantics and the other is a hateful fantasy that deserves no place in society.

Nazis committed genocide, but that's not what Nazism was. The Nazis existed and were active for years before they had the opportunity to carry out genocide, and even then many details were kept secret from the vast majority of Nazis because the leaders recognized they would lose popular support. To say the civilians rioting in the street, ransacking and assaulting as the authorities did nothing, during Kristallnacht weren't Nazis just because there were no death camps at that time is beyond absurd.

Nazism is a political ideology which combines the ultranationalism and authoritarianism of fascism with fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, and racism. To the extent that any ideology can be summed up in three words, race-based fascism is a pretty good definition. If you see someone espousing both fascism and racism, labelling them a Nazi or neo-nazi is generally appropriate. To act like nazism is some impossible level of evil that no living person could ever reach is to deny both the reality that millions of people did in fact adhere to these views in the past, and that even today a small but vocal minority see this ideology as legitimate.

Don't minimize the current threat by thinking it isn't as dangerous.

Re the comparison - Yes it seems far different if you look 30's nazism as a historical artifact, in retrospect. But the genocidey things only happened pretty late in the game and was even then kept in secret for long. A better point of comparison is what happened earier, there's plenty of differences and similarities to be found there worth arguing.