I know that's a very loaded headline so there's a few things I'd like to get out of the way right off the bat.
Firstly, I mean it. Exactly as it's written. If you encounter a Nazi it should be ok to simply shoot them in the face and be done with it. If you think this makes me just as bad as they are then I encourage you to look into the parodox of intolerance.
That said, I also want to acknoledge that there are a lot of people out there that think they're Nazis but aren't actually. Whether through ignorance or stupidity they don't actually know who and what the Nazis were and have rallied around some ideal they don't understand. I vaguely sympathize with those people, though only to the extent that I feel bad for stupidity in general. In their case I'm mostly just embarassed for them as their stupidity frames their awfulness to be even worse than it already is.
I acknowledge that you can be a white supremacist asshole without being a Nazi. That still makes you awful, but doesn't mean you should be killed for it. That would be a Nazi way of thinking and in no way would I even suggestively endorse it.
And that's the kicker.
Nazis weren't just right-wing zealots. They were monsters. If you don't believe that torturing and murdering the people you dislike is a perfectly reasonable solution for dealing with them, then you're not a Nazi. You can't redefine what Nazis are and try to portray yourself as a kinder gentler Nazi. If that's your way of thinking then you're not a Nazi and should be standing right beside me in condemning anyone who is.
The world seems to be normalizing this insanity. The president of the United States has defended actual Nazis. The people of Toronto just cast over 25 thousand votes for a Nazi sympathizer to be mayor. I fear that people are forgetting what Nazis are and that it's allowing a dangerous rise in tolerance for people who cannot be tolerated.
If you disagree with me on this premise and don't think they should be killed, then I suggest that you too don't actually know what Nazis are and what they did.
Now I know that we will never tolerate the execution of Nazis who haven't otherwise committed any crimes yet, but if there's one thing I'd like everyone, no matter your political persuasions, to take from this it's this: If you find yourself shoulder to shoulder with Nazis on any issue whatsoever, the most important thing in that moment is to separate yourself from them and to condemn the Nazis.
There is no issue whereby your shared beliefs make it ok to stand with them. They are everyone's mortal enemy. Whatever it is you're standing for, you must first be opposed to Nazis. Only then can you deal with whatever issue it is that is so important to you that you even considered allying yourself with a Nazi in the first place for.
Of course, a big part of the problem is the re-normalization of hatred post-9/11. Before then, it wasn't quite yet considered "bad" to be a racist asshole — it was acknowledged that most people had racist leanings — but most people had the decency to at least pretend to be ashamed of it. After 9/11, those who spoke up in defense of Muslims were suddenly in "the wrong". From there, it's been a long, slippery slope into the situation we have now, where the President of the "free world" (not my free world, 'though, thank God) is a hateful piece of shit. When someone in what would have been considered the single most important role in the world a few short decades ago is a vocal Nazi sympathizer (to say nothing of all the other groups of people he's openly hostile towards — which is to say, anybody who isn't a rich, straight, white man), it's going to be lot easier for him to function as a shining stream of shit to light the way for the other hateful people. I can only hope that the pendulum swings *hard* in the other direction when he's out of office. It's going to be a long few years.