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#12: Remembering
Means Fighting
Full Transcript:
INTRO
Clara: The Ex-Worker;
Alanis: An audio strike against a monotone world;
Clara: A twice-monthly podcast of anarchist ideas and action;
For everyone who dreams of a life off the clock.
Clara: Welcome back to the twelfth episode of the Ex-Worker! Today we’re going to continue our exploration of fascism and resistance to it, with a bit more about the exciting history of anarchist anti-fascists, and sharing a “Free Speech FAQ” for rebutting free speech defenses of fascist rallies.
Alanis: We’ll also have a special Chopping Block with anti-fascist movie reviews, plus an exciting interview with a member of the Occupied London Collective about fascism and resistance in Greece, as well as listener feedback, news, events: the whole nine yards. I’m Alanis,
Clara: And I’m Clara, and we’ll be your hosts. Visit our website at crimethinc.com/podcast for more information about all the things we discuss on today’s episode. And get in touch with any feedback or suggestions via podcast at crimethinc dot com, by calling us at 202–59-NOWORK, 202–596–6975, or rating us on iTunes.
Alanis: Let’s get started!
THE HOT WIRE
Alanis: We’ll begin with the Hot Wire, our look at resistance going on across the globe. Clara, what’s in the news?
Clara: On indigenous Mikmaq territory in New Brunswick, eastern Canada, a blockade erected by the Elsipogtog First Nation to prevent a fracking corporation from despoiling their land was attacked by police , who arrested forty. Protestors torched five police cars and continued the blockade as solidarity actions erupted across Canada .
Alanis: As we go to press, over 25 refugees entered their 11th day of a hunger strike taking place in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany. They’re demanding that their asylum requests be granted in the face of an increasingly restrictive and racist immigration and asylum system. Police have repeatedly harassed the strikers, taking their supplies and preventing them from erecting minimal support structures to protect themselves from heavy rains. Several strikers have already been hospitalized as a result. Solidarity demos are taking place around the country. To follow the strike and learn more about refugee resistance in Germany and beyond, visit refugeestruggle.org.
Clara: Meanwhile, 191 migrants in a detention center in Lindsay, Ontario went on hunger strike in late September; some are still on strike while many face deportation or solitary confinement for their resistance. Find out updates on the strikers and how to show solidarity at endimmigrationdetention.wordpress.com.
Alanis: Ecological news, as per usual, is grim. The Overseas Development Institute has released a report concluding that “extreme weather could be the most important cause of poverty.” The report states how climate change is increasing and its effects keep people poor, canceling progress on poverty reduction . It criticizes first world relief efforts for being reactionary rather than preventative, and for prioritizing middle-income countries.
Clara: Of course, living in a capitalist economy in which profit rather than human need forms the basis of resource distribution is the most important cause of poverty. That’s why so-called “relief” efforts fit this charitable reactive model rather than catalyzing a reorganization of society along lines of mutual aid. It’s a common strategy of ruling elites to blame so-called “natural” disasters for the problems fundamentally caused by human injustice, as we’ve seen from Katrina and Sandy to famines and typhoons. We’re glad that this report focuses attention on how destruction of the environment and global warming must be halted to alleviate human misery; however, we’re not thrilled that it misses the key point, which is that capitalism is the reason that millions are poor in the first place while a few roll in wealth, and why ecocidal development continues to threaten all life on earth.
Alanis: Meanwhile, the strongest typhoon to hit Japan in ten years brought over five inches of rain, burst river banks, and caused mudslides, killing at least seventeen and flooding the infamous Fukushima nuclear power plant, though officials say the floodwater pumped out of the contaminated water storage tanks was within “safe radiation limits.”
Clara: In Yuyao, eastern China, protestors threw stones and overturned police vehicles after the government failed to offer flood relief in the wake of Typhoon Fitow. Protesters bloodied by police after attacking the Communist Party’s offices were encouraged to “express their rational demands at an appropriate time, and in a reasonable manner.”
Alanis: And researchers in the UK report that only 21% of children feel a “connection with nature.” Authors of a recent study say that “nature is not perceived as interesting or engaging. In some cases it is perceived as a dirty or unsafe thing”.
Clara: Children may not like the nature, but they sure do seem to like the riot. In Brazil, young anarchists joined with striking schoolteachers to fight police in massive demonstrations in Rio de Janeiro. In response to state and media efforts to scapegoat them, the State Union of Education Professionals voted in their assembly to declare unconditional support for the Black Bloc . woo!
Alanis: We’re confident that our incisive coverage has convinced you long ago to delete your Facebook page. But just in case… Yet more revelations from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate that the NSA collects email contact lists in a way that’s illegal in the US by making deals with foreign companies and intelligence agencies abroad . Data centers in other countries operated by companies like Google and, you guessed it, Facebook have provided the US government with as many as 700,000 email address books in a single day.
Clara: On October 19th demonstrations in Nantes marked the one year anniversary of the French government’s attempts to expel squatters from the Zone a Defendre or “ZAD”, a land occupation resisting the planned construction of an airport in western France .
Alanis: An anti-fascist update: four Russian anarchists arrested months ago in Kazan for allegedly participating in a militant confrontation with fascists have finally been released , but face trial soon and are in need of support. You can find links to the Moscow Anarchist Black Cross support page via our website.
Clara: Three days of occupation and protests by Romanian villagers successfully forced oil giant Chevron to abandon plans to begin test drilling for hydrofracking in the area…
Alanis: …while local residents have erected a month-long blockade against a Monsanto plant under construction in Malvinas, Argentina .
Clara: 250 demonstrators in Arizona chained themselves to buses carrying immigrants to deportation centers and blocked entrance to an ICE facility , protesting the repressive deportation program called Operation Streamline and the Obama administration’s refusal to take effective action to stop the racist assault on immigrant communities.
Alanis: And finally, the Ex-Worker extends its congratulations to Earth First! , whose logo has been listed as a terrorist symbol according to a declassified army training manual . Other highlights include portraying the Animal Liberation Front and Al-Qaeda on the same page as UK terror threats, and listing the Palestinian flag as a terrorist symbol. The Ex-Worker demands to know what we have to do to get our humble logo listed in such prestigious company.
Clara: Making podcasting a threat again!
LISTENER FEEDBACK
Alanis: We got some updates from an anti-fascist organizer on the east coast recently, following up on some of the trends we discussed in our last episode. They want to encourage everyone to come out to protest the Montana-based National Policy Institute (NPI) at their conference at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington DC on Oct. 26th, 2013 . NPI uses the illusion of academic legitimacy to promote racist hatred, releasing studies calling for mass deportation of immigrants, plotting to make the Republican Party entirely white, and advocating for “the European World” to adopt racial eugenics policies. Speakers will include members of the Council of Conservative Citizens and the KKK.
Clara: They also had this to say: It seems like there’s been a worrisome upswing in fascist organizing in general recently. When the KKK’s planned march on Gettysburg was thwarted 2 weeks ago by the government shutdown, they went and leafleted in downtown Frederick, Maryland instead.
NPI and American Renaissance now have their very own Hitler Youth-style auxiliary, too, called the “Traditionalist Youth Network” or “TradYouth”. They’ve been advocating what I’m tempted to call Fascism Without Adjectives, calling for a big-tent “pro-white” movement, and courting more openly extremist racist organizations than the suit-and-tie crowd is usually comfortable with. On their website in an essay called “I Hate Freedom” - I swear I’m not making this up - Matthew Heimbach writes, “Whether you are a Christian authoritarian like myself, a Constitutionalist, a fascist, a National Socialist, or whatever stripe of white Traditionalist, just acknowledge that it is time to throw off the shackles of the poisoned American mindset, time for a new unity within our folk and new ideas for a new age”. He recently spoke at an event organized by the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement in Kansas City, and justified it by claiming the NSM has an “impressive record of street activism and grassroots organizing.” Last week on Oct 9th in Terre Haute, Indiana, at their protest against a talk by anti-racist author Tim Wise, Heimbach and fellow racist student Matthew Parrott held down and beat up an anti-racist who they allege attacked them first. Parrott is scheduled to speak on a panel about “new directions for activism” at the NPI conference. These assholes are looking to combine the violent thuggishness of neo-Nazis with the polished legitimacy of academic racism, so I consider them the most important threat for antifas to be dealing with at the moment.
Alanis: Thanks for the updates! This is definitely a disturbing trend, and one we should watch carefully. We want to urge everyone who can to turn out for the demo against the NPI conference next weekend, and keep posted to websites like One People’s Project for updates on how to shut down these scumbags.
Clara: We also want to point out how the kind of rhetorical strategies these folks are using, and how similar they can sound to radical or even anarchist discourses. Talking about how traditional American values are bankrupt, appeals to scene unity, throwing off shackles, street activism, grassroots organizing… this effort to parallel or appropriate radical discourse makes it all the more crucial for us to take militant anti-fascist stances and actions as anarchists.
Alanis: We’ve been getting lots of great feedback from you recently, and we’ll do our best to respond by email or on the show as we can. Keep it coming to podcast at crimethinc dot com.
CONTRADICTIONARY
And now it’s time to share a piece of the CrimethInc Contradictionary . This episode is brought to you by: Border and Bailout.
Alanis: For more explorations of the war in every word, visit crimethinc.com/contradictionary.
FASCISM AND ANTI-FASCISM FEATURE, PART II
Deep in the Bolivian jungle in a little village called San Buenaventura, next to a row of wooden shacks, sits a small, unremarkable brick house. In it lives an elderly man who has spent over seventy years fleeing or fighting state power. In a 2008 interview with the BBC, 87-year old Antonio Garcia Baron described a life of resistance that took him from the anarchist militias of the Spanish Civil War to a Nazi concentration camp to an anarchist community among the Guarani people of the Amazon rain forest. He came to Bolivia on the advice of French anarchist Gaston Leval, saying, “I asked him for a sparsely populated place, without services like water and electricity, where people lived like 100 years ago - because where you have civilization you’ll find priests.” He describes shooting down German planes from the beach of Dunkirk, surviving over 100 attempts on his life, and losing an arm to a jaguar attack in the jungle. He is, as far as we know, the last living survivor of the Durruti Column, a determined band of anarchist soldiers he joined as a teenager to help hold the forces of Spanish fascism at bay. Garcia Baron’s colorful life traces back to the first years of anarchists fighting fascism, a long and equally colorful tradition that continues to this day.
Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922. In his early years, he seemed an unlikely candidate to found a political movement that would become the arch enemy of anarchists and radicals across the world for the next century. In fact, his father Alessandro had joined Bakunin’s Anarchist International in the 1870s. As a young man Mussolini continued the family passion for radical politics, becoming editor of the Socialist Party’s newspaper Avanti! and even translating some of Kropotkin’s works from French into Italian. But when World War I broke out he joined the Italian army, and, turning his back onhis egalitarian convictions, combined strands of socialist thought with militarism and nationalism into what would become known as fascism.
Some of the intellectual currents within radical politics in the early twentieth century took root among the first fascists. Many admired French anarcho-syndicalist Georges Sorel, author of the widely influential 1908 book Reflections on Violence, who theorized that the grand myth of the general strike could catalyze violent rebellion and lead to revolution. Likewise, the ideas of insurrectionary socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui formed a central part of Mussolini’s notion of socialism within the fascist project. The valorization of violence and direct action proved influential on many fascists, though they would adopt those tactical principles towards consolidating hierarchical power rather than dismantling it.
As Mussolini and then Hitler came to power and fascist movements grew in various countries, radical and reactionary forces increasingly polarized across Europe. In Spain, when military dictator Primo de Rivera fell from power in 1930, the republican government faced a tug-of-war between the fascist Falangists and a Popular Front of socialists and communists, while anarchist rebellions flared around the peninsula. In 1936, after the Popular Front gained control of the government, General Francisco Franco participated in a coup and, with the support of Italy and Germany, invaded the country. The initial coup attempt was defeated in Barcelona by the armed populace, and anarchist revolution soon broke out through much of Catalonia and parts of Aragon. In July, 1936, an anarchist militia organized by Buenaventura Durruti set out from Barcelona towards Zaragosa, retaking territory from the fascists and collectivizing property throughout the countryside.
In this atmosphere of fear and possibility, anarchists and radicals from all over Europe and across the Atlantic arrived to support the fight against fascism. The Durruti Column attracted American and Canadian members of the IWW, alongside radical refugees from fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Louis Emile Cottin, who had attempted to assassinate French President Clemenceau in 1919, died fighting with the Column in Barcelona, while French philosopher Simone Weil joined as well. In Valencia, another anarchist militia formed called the Iron Column, which liberated prisoners, destroyed judicial records, and fought without a traditional military hierarchy.
Ultimately, the anarchist militias were defeated by a combination of fascist military strength, lack of supplies, and the treacherous betrayals of Communists whose loyalty to Stalin’s Soviet regime trumped both social revolution and military unity. Many of the survivors of the militias fled across the Pyrenees after the Civil War and joined the French Resistance or plotted guerrilla attacks against the Franco regime. One of the most famous of these Spanish Maquis was Francisco Sabate Llopart, whose exploits made him Public Enemy Number One of the dictatorship until his death in combat in 1960. Over fifteen years of mayhem, Sabate and his comrades conducted raids, assassinated fascist officials, robbed banks, and evaded capture against overwhelming odds. Anarchists across Europe and beyond supported the guerrilla fighters and took solidarity actions against Spanish targets. Scottish anarchist and future Angry Brigade arrestee Stuart Christie was sent to prison in Spain as a teenager for transporting explosives to be used in an assassination plot against Franco.
Other survivors from the anti-fascist militias fled across the Atlantic to Latin America, helping catalyze anarchist organizing from Mexico to Argentina. Some, like Antonio Garcia Baron, ended up living out their anarchist values far from civilization, keeping the dream of freedom alive in the remote jungles of the Amazon basin.
The anarchists who continued the fight against Franco knew that the end of World War II had not meant the end of fascism. And as new fascist movements arose in Britain, Germany and beyond in the 1970s and 80s, anarchists arose again to face the old threat in new faces. Our anti-fascist struggles today stem from these heroic guerrillas and bandits and uncontrollables. Although the social revolution they tasted did not survive, their determined resistance and thirst for freedom live on.
FREE SPEECH FAQ
Clara: We touched briefly in the last episode on the way that fascists have capitalized on “free speech” discourse to legitimize their organizing and attempt to incur backlash against militant anti-fascists, often successfully. Anarchists have historically fought for free speech - not because the first amendment says so, but because we fight to defend freedom against all state repression. Yet today this discourse is turned against us in an effort to incapacitate resistance. This puts us between a rock and a hard place, risking either alienating potential allies among civil libertarians or allowing fascists to spread their hate unimpeded.
In response to this conundrum, contributors to Rolling Thunder #9 wrote an article titled “Not Free Speech, But Freedom Itself,” exploring the politics of free speech in the context of anti-fascism. Included alongside the article was a “Free Speech FAQ”, intended as a tool for anti-fascist organizers responding to common myths and misconceptions. We’ve revised it slightly and offer it here in that spirit. We hope that all of you listeners out there will take it, update or revise it as you see fit, and use it when speaking to media and potential allies in your own struggles against fascism.
Alanis: “Stopping fascists from speaking makes you just as bad as them.”
Clara: Failing to stop fascists from speaking - that is, giving them the opportunity to organize to impose their agenda on the rest of us - makes you as bad as them. If you care about freedom, don’t stand idly by while people mobilize to take it away.
Alanis: “Shouldn’t we just ignore them? They want attention, and if we give it to them we’re letting them win.”
Clara: Actually, fascists usually don’t want to draw attention to their organizing; they do most of it in secret, fearing (correctly) that an outraged public will shut them down. They only organize public events to show potential recruits that they have power, and to try to legitimize their views as part of the political spectrum. By publicly disrupting and humiliating fascists, we make it clear to them and their potential supporters that they are not in control and can’t wield the power that they glorify. Ignoring fascists only allows them to organize unhindered - a dangerous mistake. Better we shut them down once and for all.
Alanis: “The best way to defeat fascism is to let them express their views so that everyone can see how ignorant they are. We can refute them more effectively with ideas than force.”
Clara: People don’t become fascists simply because they’re persuaded by their ideas. Fascism claims to offer power to those who feel threatened by shifting social and economic realities. The fact that their analysis of these shifts are ignorant misses the point; do we need to cite examples of how dumb ideas have proved massively popular throughout history? From Italy to Germany to streets around the world today, fascists haven’t gained strength through rational argument, but through organizing to wield power at the expense of others. To counter this, we can’t just argue against them; we have to prevent them from organizing by any means necessary. We can debate their ideas all day long, but if we don’t prevent them from building the capacity to make them reality, it won’t matter. Only popular self-defense, not simply debate, has succeeded in stopping fascism.
Alanis: “Neo-Nazis are irrelevant; institutionalized racism poses the real threat today, not the extremists at the fringe.”
Clara: Our society’s institutions are indeed deeply racist, and our organizing must challenge and dismantle them. But the visibility of neo-Nazis and fringe fascists enables other right-wing groups to frame themselves as moderates, legitimizing their racist and xenophobic positions and the systems of power and privilege they defend. Taking a stand against fascists is an essential step toward discrediting the structures and values at the root of institutionalized racism. Plus, as we heard last episode, suit-and-tie fascists are infiltrating positions of influence in academia and politics, giving them dangerous power to advance racist policies on an institutional level.
And fascists around the world are still terrorizing and murdering people. It’s both naïve and disrespectful to their victims to minimize the reality of fascist violence. Fascists act directly to carry out their agenda rather than limiting themselves to representative democracy, so even small numbers can be disproportionately dangerous, making it crucial to deal with them swiftly.
Alanis: “Free speech means protecting everyone’s right to speak, including people you don’t agree with. How would you like it if you had an unpopular opinion and other people were trying to silence you?”
Clara: We oppose fascists because of what they do, not what they say. We’re not opposed to free speech; we’re opposed to enacting an agenda of hate and terror. We have no power to censor them; they continue to publish hate literature in print and on the internet. Their public events don’t exist to express views, but to build the power they need to enforce their hatred.
The government and police have never protected everyone’s free speech equally, and never will; they systematically repress views and actions that challenge existing power inequalities. They spend hundreds of thousands of public dollars on riot police and helicopters to defend a KKK rally, but for a radical demonstration the same police will be there to stop it, not to protect it; just look at the evictions of the Occupy encampments, attacks on Earth First! actions, or countless other examples. Of course anarchists don’t like being silenced by the state, but we don’t want the state to define and manage our freedom, either. The First Amendment covers what laws Congress shall or shall not enact; it’s up to us to determine what we need to do to defend ourselves. Unlike the ACLU, whose supposed defense of “freedom” leads them to support the KKK and neo-Nazis, we support self-defense and self-determination above all. What’s the purpose of free speech, if not to foster a world free from oppression? Fascists oppose this vision; thus we oppose fascism by any means necessary.
Alanis: “Trying to suppress their voices will backfire by generating interest in them.”
Clara: Resistance to fascism doesn’t increase interest in fascist views. If anything, liberals mobilizing to defend fascists on free speech grounds increases interest in their views by conferring legitimacy on them. This plays directly into their organizing goals, allowing them to drive a wedge between their opponents using free speech as a smokescreen. By tolerating racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia, so-called free speech advocates are complicit in the acts of terror that fascist organizing makes possible.
Alanis: “They have rights like everybody else.”
Clara: No one has the right to threaten our community with violence. Likewise, we reject the “right” of the government and police - who have more in common with fascists than they do with us - to decide for us when fascists have crossed the line from merely expressing themselves into posing an immediate threat. We will not abdicate our freedom to judge when and how to defend ourselves.
MUGSHOT: INTERVIEW WITH OCCUPIED LONDON
Alanis: In our last episode, we discussed the murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas in Greece by members of the fascist Golden Dawn party. On this episode’s Mugshot, we have an extra special feature to share: an in-depth interview with Dimitris, a member of the Occupied London Collective, which issues firsthand reports and insightful analysis on the unfolding crisis in Greece from an anarchist perspective. Dimitris frames the rise of the Golden Dawn within the emergence of neoliberal capitalism in Europe, illuminating the role of fascist movements as a “parastate” force on hand for governments to use to help impose austerity measures. He challenges the narrative that anarchists and fascists are both responding to disillusionment with government and economic crisis, and describes anti-fascist resistance on the streets of Athens and beyond.
If you’d like to follow along with a text version of the interview, you can find it on our website, crimethinc.com/podcast, by following the link for “Full Transcript.”
Alanis: I’m here today with Dimitris from the Occupied London Collective. Dimitris, thank you for speaking with us.
Dimitris: Thank you very much for organizing that. I am Dimitris from the Occupied London Collective, which is a collective which started in 2007 in London as a magazine collective; we were publishing an anarchist magazine called “Voices of Resistance From Occupied London.” The short name was “Occupied London.” And since December of 2008, we focused most of our energy into the blog “From the Greek Streets,” which is translating in English news from Greece, from the streets of Greece from an anarchist perspective, and now we just released our fifth and last issue. Previously we just published also a book called Revolt and Crisis in Greece . And now we’re just preparing to move towards a more inclusive new form of digital information, information and propaganda spreading.
Alanis: Fascism in Greece appears to have expanded from a small but violent extreme right to a very powerful social and political force in the last few years. Why has the Golden Dawn been able to grow so much recently?
Dimitris: The main reason is that there’s money, right. A big amount of money came into Golden Dawn coffers. The Golden Dawn, until 2009, was a marginal group, receiving about 0.2% in the national elections, and by 2012 had grown to a party which received 7% of the vote. What happened during that period is pretty straightforward. Lots of money came in, and from a marginal party of two or three local offices, grew to a party which has over fifty local branches and offices all around Greece. And obviously you can understand that in order to achieve something like this, you need to have a lot of money. And of course there is a lot of propaganda. There is all this activity of Golden Dawn which was… For example, soup kitchens, food giving – you know, charity, in fact – which again requires money. And finally there were people in Golden Dawn who are getting paid for the job they were doing in the party, which included racist attacks, I am guessing, as part of their duties. So actually we’re talking about a big amount of money.
Another thing which you have to bear in mind is that in Greece there is a tradition of extreme right-wing groups employed by the state authorities in order to suppress the far left. This is a very old story; it starts already in the 1930’s with the fascist dictatorship of Metaxas (who, actually, the Golden Dawn loves), and goes on all the way through after the Greek civil war which ends in 1949. It is really glorified during the dictatorship between 1967 and 1974, and it goes on in the post-dictatorial period. Again, there are these extreme right-wing reserves which are available for the state in order to suppress any time it is considered that there is a threat from the far left, or from anarchists in our case more recently, and so on. And so remember: it is not accidental that Golden Dawn rises a lot after the revolt of 2008, you know. There are some historical links there that can be done. There was a major revolt, anti-governmental revolt, anti-state revolt if you want, which had great potentialities, gave a lot of dynamism to the radical movement, the antagonistic movement. Suddenly you have neo-Nazis emerging there as the fear factor against these new social and political forces.
So I think that’s the reason that the Golden Dawn has grown the last few years.
Alanis: It seems like fascist movements are also on the rise in France, Serbia, Hungary, and elsewhere. How does the Golden Dawn fit into the context of fascism across Europe?
Dimitris: There is a wider transformation in the form of European governance. Remember, you have an extreme neoliberalism, an extreme version of capitalism implicated through the global south for several decades. Soon, in the early 90s, you have a very similar regime of extreme neoliberalism being implemented through Eastern Europe, the former socialist states. Now you have a very, very similar extreme neoliberalism, extreme capitalism being implicated to the periphery of western Europe, the Europe which after the Second World War wasn’t socialist. So now you have the expansion towards that direction, which would be Greece, Italy, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, the entire European periphery, within which this extreme neoliberalism requires, needs, a violent apparatus. The passage to the periphery soon implies the passage of that form of governance or that new political economy to the rest of Europewestern Europe, : to Britain, to France, to Scandinavia even. You know, you see all of these principles of social states, social provisions, all the Keynesianist post war models vanishing all around Europe. Especially on the periphery which suffers from some more capitalist crisis, but also western Europe. In order to implement such a system you need a terrorist apparatus; you need an apparatus that will not obey the law. Because you can’t get the police on the street to start shooting protestors. But you can have paramilitants. You can have a parastate – which is a very interesting concept, right, it’s been in the Greek language already since the 50’s or before, probably - there was the concept of the parastate, which, you know, it’s like paramilitant, a second state, an extension of the state, which was used by the right. So this is the reason why we see the rise of the extreme right all around Europe: because neoliberalism, because capitalism, in order to be implemented, it needs a force, a violent force, a violent apparatus, to be out there, to threaten anybody who might potentially protest, to threaten anybody who might be anti-capitalist, to threaten anyone who might be anti-fascist.
And you know, fascism in Europe is something that is really threatening. It’s something which governed most of the countries of Europe in the 1930’s, which is just two generations ago. It is something which drove the continent into a war, and millions of people died, due to of fascism. And actually, when you bring fascism again to Europe, you force all these parts of the society who be otherwise anti-capitalist or anti-state, or a great part of the society, to somehow try to trust in the state. Because suddenly if you’re facing Nazis or fascists, a right-wing state, a neoliberal state looks like a great option, right?. You’re like, OK, people may be starving, people may be committing suicide because they don’t have enough to eat, people may become homeless, but this is better than having a Nazi government. So actually, it is really helpful in many ways, the rise of the extreme right.
And the rise of the extreme right in each country, it has its own individual history, right, and exactly that tradition is there, and it was there to set the roots of the extreme right in these countries, which are mobilized over time historically when it’s necessary for capitalism to elevate its form, right, for a new form of extreme capitalism to emerge. So this is the situation, I think; that’s why we see the rise of the extreme right. It’s something that is necessary at the moment to the system.
Alanis: How will the murder of Pavlos Fyssas and the backlash against the Golden Dawn recently is going to affect fascism in Greece and the struggle against it?
The murder of Pavlos Fyssas was an escalation in the extreme right-wing violence. What do I mean by that? The neo-Nazis in the streets, so far, were killing migrants or beating up migrants and people who were some of the most vulnerable and some of the most invisible, also, socially. The attack to an anti-fascist who happens to hold a Greek passport is really just an escalation, which made very clear to anybody at all, to anybody who’s even slightly anti-fascist, that actually it’s a matter of time [before they] come for the next ones. First they started from the most vulnerable parts of society, which had the least possibilities to somehow resist. Because most of the victims of the neo-Nazi violence on the street are people who lack documents, so they cannot even go to the hospital because they do not have legal documents. They cannot go to the police department; they have limited potentiality to defending themselves against lots of violence. Now, as long as you escalation going openly against left people, for example, now: it is an obvious escalation. It caused a lot of changes in the way the fascists are perceived in Greece.
First of all, we saw some of the largest anti-fascist demonstrations and protests we have ever seen. They were very dynamic; we saw attacks on Golden Dawn offices in Athens, the headquarters of the Golden Dawn - protected by the police, of course, right? In some cases supported Police support in fact. Because, you know, you had big antifascist demonstrations in Keratsini, the area of Athens where Pavlos Fyssas was killed. And actually, you saw during these protests neo-Nazis collaborating together with the riot police attacking the anti-fascist demonstrations. So we are in a situation where things polarize more than before. It is more and more evident now that Nazis are ready actually to start the pogroms, you know, the much more wider pogroms, which they already had started them against migrants, but now they are ready to start going for everyone else. This rang a bell. This woke up all of these forces, all of these anti-fascist forces in society which so far had been shocked from the rise of fascism, had been shocked from the economic measurements, from the form of capitalism, which was killing people violently en masse, massively. And now they woke up and they reacted. Obviously that was something that had a catalytic power on the form of the anti-fascist movement.
Of course suddenly the state intervenes and arrests the members of the Golden Dawn. Now, there are a lot of questions behind such an action. Why suddenly the state wants to arrest its extreme right apparatus, right, why suddenly they hate them when they were so useful to them so far. There are a lot of [deportation] there. Some of the deportations could be, because the anti-austerity and union movement and anti-fascist movements start rising after the assassination. So you have a situation where actually the society was starting boiling, right, was close to one of these near-boiling points, right. The state sees these big anti-far-right demonstrations; and remember, the Greek state is governed by a right government which is the most extreme right government that Greece has seen after the end of the dictatorship, right. Pretty straightforward. So obviously they were like, these anti-right demonstrations, these could easily escalate and go far, and that was why they intervened.
So yeah, we need to wait and see what is the plan there, the political plan there to be done. Because it doesn’t mean that racist attacks or neo-Nazi attacks vanished because some of the leaders of the Golden Dawn were arrested. The neo-Nazis are still out on the streets. And they are an available reserve if the state will need a violent apparatus. As I told you before, the very next day after the assassination, during the anti-fascist demonstrations, neo-Nazis were filmed collaborating with riot police against anti-fascists. So you know, it doesn’t mean that arresting the leadership is the end of fascism in Greece. On the contrary, actually you have an almost – a government which adopts a lot of fascist logics, and has a lot of extreme right wing members, in a way reconsidering the right-wing space, political spectrum, in some ways. We don’t know what kind of configuration they’re trying to do, though.
Alanis: It seems like some of the same conditions that fascists have capitalized on - economic instability, the social unrest, distrust of government – these are also some of the conditions that have led the anarchist movement in Greece has become one of the most powerful in the world. How do anarchists set themselves apart from fascists in how they respond to the conflicts in Greek society?
Dimitris: I think that that’s a wrong interpretation. The extreme right wing in Greece has a very long history, while Greek anarchism is something which starts in the 1970’s, mostly grows in the 80’s, 90’s, and so on, right. And so there were two very different apparatuses. While, on the one hand, extreme right adopts this discourse that is anti-systemic. Or, at the same time, gets a lot of analysts, journalists especially, seem to adopt this idea saying, oh, the poor people who support Golden Dawn it’s because they’re anti-systemic: it’s a very wrong interpretation. The actual Golden Dawn, the actual neo-Nazis, are not anti-systemic in any way.
Golden Dawn, at the same time, has a kind of parliamentary activity which is very systemic. For example, they support the richest, the most powerful class in Greek society, which are the shipping companies, the maritime companies, the ship owners, actually, right, who are really, really powerful, and in Greece are actually the richest people. And more or less, they control every single government in the country. Actually you have the Golden Dawn, which is a small party, supporting the most powerful and the most systemic part of the society within the parliament and for example supporting the government when the government wanted to promote more tax exceptions for these corporations. So you see, while Golden Dawn is advertising an anti-systemic profile and a lot of people are confused- oh, it’s anti-systemic, people who support Golden Dawn are people who have been disappointed by the state. I don’t think this is exactly true.
I think that the situation with Golden Dawn is- OK, it’s a complex mix, we talk about 400,000 voters who voted for that party, who are actually are very much collectively responsible for the assassinations that Golden Dawn members commit the last two, three years, right. Especially after the elections; people knew when they were voting. But let’s bear in mind, just recently I was reading that 25% of Golden Dawn voters identify with neo-Nazis and say, yeah, we are neo-Nazis. 25% of the people who vote for Golden Dawn! So it is not exactly people who are disappointed.
There was a fascist element of the Greek society which the Greek society had throughout its history, who gathered, found an expression through that party. Before there were various other parties, mostly right wing. But now they found their expression perfectly through that party. Before Golden Dawn, there was another extreme right-wing party. It was LAOS, the “People’s Orthodox Alert,” right, which was around for ten years, and was extreme right, as well. It was more populist extreme right; it would look more like LePen’s party in France, but still, it was an extreme right wing, fascist in many ways, party. We are in a situation where there was this element, it was there. So it is not that suddenly, all of these people are disappointed, people who could potentially be something else but they were attracted by the rhetoric of Golden Dawn; they were very right wing and conservative people already, so they were perfectly happy to see a fascist party, a neo-Nazi party, coming around, which would express them.
So I don’t think so that things are that simple. I think that it is a very different kind of people, the ones are anti-systemic and for example become anarchist, and the ones who, you know, become fascists because they’re not anti-systemic, and they were already fascist in their logics. So I think there is a basic mistake in that question, and it’s important to understand that mistake.
Alanis: What kinds of organizing and actions have Greek anarchists been taken against fascism?
Dimitris: There have been for a long time anti-fascist activities taking place on by the Greek anarchists all these years. In fact, one of the reasons that Golden Dawn was tiny and marginal in the past is because Greek anti-fascists, mostly anarchists, were actually resisting them on the street. For example, if Golden Dawn would organize an event, a demonstration, a march, whatever, on a public space, Greek antifascists would go and occupy the public space well in advance, and wouldn’t allow the Nazis to come over. Since the rise of the Golden Dawn, though, you see very, very explicit collaboration between police forces and the neo-Nazis, in support of the neo-Nazis.
For example, when the motorbike antifascist demonstrations started, in September 2012, two months after the election. What was that? That was, you know, twenty or thirty motorbikes with anti-fascists who would ride around the areas of Athens where the fascists were attacking migrants. So through their presence there, they were making clear that migrants are not by themselves, that obviously there is anti-fascist force, anti-fascist solidarity towards the migrants in the area, and at the same time it was an anti-fascist presence that was there to stop fascist attacks. So as these kind of demonstrations start going, police attacked and police arrested all of the participants to one of the big antifascist demonstrations, motor patrols, so-called motor demonstrations in late September. And the next day, at the court of Athens, they attacked the group who came in solidarity to the arrested anti-fascists and arrested some more people. And, you know, just one month later, the police attacked and evicted the most historical, the two most historical squats in the center of Athens, and a less historical but equally important squat which came after the December revolt. Skaramanga squat, this is the newest, and Villa Amalias](http://en.squat.net/2012/12/20/athens-greece-anarchist-squat-villa-amalias-raided-by-riot-police-today/) and Lelas Karagianni , the two older ones - now we talk about December 2012 and January 2013 - attacked and evicted the squats very close to the areas which are located in the areas of Athens where neo-Nazis are active. In fact, dismantling major anti-fascist infrastructure in the area and opening up the way to neo-Nazis to be active on the streets. It was a very explicit collaboration between the current government and the neo-Nazis in terms of everyday life on the street.
So obviously, there were certain limitations to that which you could do, because you would be arrested and crushed by the state immediately. By the way, it is really important to bear in mind that when they attack, that was in September 2012, when they attacked the anti-fascist motor demonstration, the arrested people were tortured, right, bear that in mind, by the police, who were coming in and taking photos of the arrested and would say, “OK, don’t worry, we’re going to send that to the Golden Dawn, and now we have your address, we have your name: we’ll see now who is the clever one.”
And then remember that one year later Pavlos Fyssas, this September, one year later, was assassinated, was stabbed to death, in the presence of police officers. Actually there were plenty of police officers present when the fascists, twenty fascists were attacking one person, killing him, and they didn’t intervene. So we’re in a situation where there is very extensive collaboration, so we need to bear that in mind when we try to think about what kind of activities take place on the streets of Athens.
The other kind of activity besides the motorbike anti-fascist demonstrations were the popular anti-fascist marches all around Athens. So you would have several hundreds of people marching on the streets of Athens with anti-fascist slogans, anti-fascist graffiti, anti-fascist flyers, without announcing, without permits, without making clear when they do that. And they were marching around Athens, making antifascist presence felt on the streets. And the other thing is that there were bigger, antifascist demonstrations that were taking place that were bigger than the ones taking place on the streets in Athens, for example the ones taking place in Petralona , the district of Athens, where a Pakistani migrant was killed, was stabbed to death out of the blue by two neo-Nazis a few months ago . And again, there were big demonstrations taking place there, and there were all these antifascist activities being active on the public sphere in the Greek cities. Remember again some of the major anti-fascist infrastructures were the squats. And squats were evicted not only in Athens but in Patras, in Ioannina, Thessaloniki, in various cities of the countries, the squats were being attacked. And precisely the reason why they were being attacked was because they were major antifascist infrastructures. So there was, if you want, a major conflict that was taking place on the streets of Athens, the major battle, the major conflict, was going on on the streets of the Greek cities; on one side were the neo-Nazis, and the police collaborating, against the antifascist social forces.
Remember Panagiotaros, an MP of Golden Dawn, a major leader of Golden Dawn, was declaring in an interview that they were prepared for civil war , that they were prepared in any way to fight the anarchists, the migrants. Remember now the state, the police pretends (or perhaps not) to dismantle the Golden Dawn, they find a lot of weapons: machine guns, rifles, weapons. They were actually armed. We’re dealing with a totally fascist Nazi party, Nazi forces that were armed, that were having military training, that were creating paramilitary forces. So obviously we talk about something which was aiming to kill people, actually kill plenty of people, with knives mostly, but they were preparing to get, to start an armed attack, which was a counter-insurrectionary attack, right? Everybody knew that migrants were the first victims, and soon they will come for the anti-fascists and anarchists. So obviously there were a lot of activities taking place in public against the fascists.
But remember, we are dealing now with a Greek society which is completely shocked from extreme austerity. You have to put everything in a context where we are dealing with circumstances which are extreme, very quickly change, actually circumstances where any kind of activity was you know, a big effort was put into being organized. Because there were a lot of problems that people said, politically, the anarchists were under attack, Greek anarchism was constantly under attack the last year, and at the same time with a lot of personal problems which had to do with austerity, with poverty, and the other factors that were involved. So we have to bear all of these things in mind.
Alanis: Can you offer any advice from the Greek context for anarchists fighting fascism elsewhere in the world?
Dimitris: I think that offering advice, this is a pedagogical, hierarchical thing. But I think there is something to be told there, to be mentioned, and something which is important I think for all of us, anti-fascists, anti-capitalists, anarchists, anti-authoritarians to remember is that fascism is a resource available to the elites, a resource available to their sovereignty. And if they want to fight anarchists, any kind of anti-authoritarianism, anti-capitalism, they are ready to mobilize their forces.
Another things which we need also to bear in mind all of us is that the Greek case hasn’t ended. You know, a lot of people wonder and ask, what happens after December, right, the revolt of 2008, and I think it’s really important to remember that the processes are still going on; the wheels of history still turn. And at the moment we’re in a situation when we’re seeing the counter-insurrectionary forces coming in Greek society, coming in Greek politics, exactly as a response to the revolt of 2008. So it’s important to bear in mind that things in Greece are still going on, and that Greece is not in a vacuum, in a void. In terms of global solidarity, it’s important to remember that we are watching events happening in Greece that are very relevant for what happens all around Europe, or probably around the west. Probably we are watching a new form of governance, a new form of capitalism being implemented in Greece as the dynamic of global capitalism at the moment. And soon it will be around the corner, around you, around in our own neighborhood.
THE CHOPPING BLOCK
Clara: In our episodes thus far, our reviews on the Chopping Block have focused on books and written texts. But this time around we’re switching it up a bit, and looking at some films that relate to our anti-fascist theme. Today we’ve got a special guest feature from Ricky Flowers about three terrific movies that tell stories of resistance to fascism at different moments throughout the twentieth century.
Ricky Flowers: The American public imagination is captivated by the destruction of fascists. It has become a founding myth that we saved the world from fascism and made it safe for liberal bourgeois democracy, and in so doing became the greatest superpower in history. This myth has given us hundreds of films about destroying Nazis, and some are excellent: Chaplin’s “Great Dictator”, Sturges’ “Great Escape”, and most recently, Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds”. Here are three excellent anti-fascist films from outside of the US that you might not have heard of:
The streets of France in the 1980s were overrun with fascists. Immigrants, anarchists and punks slunk through the markets and subways of Paris cowed by the threat of skinheads who terrorized them with the support of the police. Then a courageous band of punks turned their bomber jackets inside out and began fighting back. With breathtaking firsthand stories of vicious streetfights, the documentary “Antifa: Chasseurs de Skin” shows how roving bands of anarchist brawlers, hip hop “Zulu” gangs, and others hunted skinheads and beat back fascists from the streets, undermining their social and institutional power. Carving a space for immigrants and anarchist politics in public space, the Red Warriors, Ruddy Foxes, and Ducky Boys freed the streets and cut short a fascist movement based in youth subculture. Unfortunately, the film has no room for women: and this is a glaring omission of what we can assume was at least 50% of the anti-fascist current in France.
In contrast, “Libertarias” is a 1996 film about Spanish Anarcha-Feminist militia Mujeres Libres, who in 1936 fought not only the fascists on the other side of the trenches and barricades but the patriarchal views of their male comrades. Rowdy sex-workers, stern feminists, chaste ex-nuns and lusty mystics alike lead an armed struggle against fascism and for a utopia of their own creation. Viewers should be aware that the film contains graphic depictions of sexual violence in its final scenes.
Prague under Nazi occupation developed an urban legend of a terrifying criminal who hid in the shadows and jumped over fences, trains, and buildings to thwart capture by the Nazi police. The Springman, or Perak, became a hero in the 1946 animated short “The Chimneysweep”, which depicts him as a black-clad, sofa-spring shoe adorned proletarian mischief maker who wreaks havoc on Nazi sympathizers. You’ll cheer as Perak bounces over, around and through the robotic occupying SS army and local snitches in his balaclava fashioned out of a sock.
As a founding myth, the destruction of Nazism in favor of the bourgeois republic hides a fatal flaw that actual resistance to fascism has taught us: Fascists are the vanguard of the status quo, a corrective measure that those who benefit from the way society is currently structured employ when liberal bourgeois democracy does not deliver them wealth and power efficiently. The only way to ensure that fascism does not re-emerge is by overthrowing this society and toppling the pillars that fascists attempt to guard: white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, and the state.
Clara: You can stream “The Chimneysweep” and “Antifa: Chasseurs de Skin” online, via links we’ve got posted on our website, crimethinc.com/podcast; “Libertarias” you’ll have to find on your own.
NEXT WEEK’S NEWS
Clara: And now we’ll conclude this episode with Next Week’s News, our round-up of exciting anarchist happenings coming up soon around the world.
Alanis: And there are TONS of things going on! Thanks to everyone who wrote in with tips on events we should mention; keep ’em coming to podcast at crimethinc dot com. So, Clara, what’s on the calendar?
Clara: On Wednesday, October 23rd the ‘Prisoner Strike Support Network’ is calling a day of action against the Canadian government’s recent legislation to cut prisoner wages, to show solidarity with prisoners across the country who have been on strike since early October . Actions will take place in Winnipeg and other cities.
Alanis: October 24th marks the 75th anniversary of the first minimum wage in the US - 25 cents an hour in 1938 - and in commemoration, the People’s Power Assembly has declared Raise Minimum Wage Day , with demonstrations in Baltimore and probably other cities.
Personally, I favor the IWW’s line about “abolishing the wage system,” but angry poor people on strike and in the streets is definitely a good thing.
Clara: As we mentioned earlier, the protest against the conference of the suit-and-tie fascist National Policy Institute takes place at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC on the 26th.
Alanis: And if you’re in DC on the 26th, also check out the rally against mass surveillance organized by the stopwatching.us website . It’s pretty liberal in its politics, but privacy and anti-surveillance is a hot issue right now, and anarchists should make ourselves visible in this resistance.
Clara: That same weekend will also feature the East Bay Anarchist Book Fair in Oakland, CA, as well as the Houston Anarchist Book Fair in Houston, TX.
Clara: And the beginning of November has a flurry of activity, too! On the first through third in Tucson, AZ, the Alliance for Global Justice will host the Tear Down the Walls National Gathering , intended to build links between a wide variety of radical struggles. Info is at afgj.org.
Alanis: On the second through fourth, the Black Petrograd festival takes place in St. Petersburg, Russia , a three day anarchist gathering with a book fair, talks and discussions, a radical history tour, a concert, and more.
Clara: And a bit closer to home, the same weekend there’s an anarchist book fair in Austin, Texas .
Alanis: And finally, some political prisoner birthdays to share: On the 21st of October, Edward Goodman Africa from the MOVE 9; if you want to learn more about their case, we’ve got a link up on our website to a documentary about them you can watch online.
Clara: And on the 1st of November, Ed Poindexter , an activist with the National Committee to Combat Fascism, a Black Panther Party group that fought police brutality, targeted by COINTELPRO and framed for the murder of a cop.
Alanis: So that’s it for this episode! This podcast is a project of CrimethInc Ex-Worker’s Collective. Thanks so much to Dimitris for speaking with us, and to Underground Reverie for the music, and to all of you for listening. You can always get in touch with us by sending an email to podcast at crimethinc dot com, leaving feedback on iTunes, or calling 202–59-NOWRK, 202–596–6975.
Clara: As the flyer for the anti-fascist demonstration in Leipzig later this month says: Remembering means fighting.
Alanis: See you next time.
Online resources
Links and references from this episode of The Ex-Worker:
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Download MP3 (70 Min; 28MB), Download OGG (27MB)
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To learn more about the history of anarchist anti-fascism, there are a wide variety of books and resources out there. On the Spanish Civil War, works by Sam Dolgoff and Vernon Richards are classic syntheses. The Irish Worker’s Solidarity Movement has an excellent webpage of resources and links on the Spanish Revolution . The website libcom.org has a huge collection of historical essays and books available to read or download. Emma Goldman , Gaston Leval , and Rudolf Rocker were contemporaries who wrote on the topic. If you enjoy “Libertarias”, one of the films we reviewed on the Chopping Block, don’t miss Martha Acklesberg’s excellent work on Mujeres Libres .
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On the anarchist militias, Abel Paz’s work on Durruti , “About the Iron Column” , and “A Day Mournful and Overcast: An Uncontrollable of the Iron Column” are solid places to start.
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George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is one of the most compelling, humorous, and poignant accounts of the Spanish Civil War, very sympathetic to anarchists although he fought with a socialist militia. (You can download a podcast version of it from “Another World is Possible” on iTunes, if you can endure the sound quality.)
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Antonio Tellez Sola ’s work on the Spanish maqui guerrillas is indispensible; don’t miss his book Sabate . Stuart Christie’s memoir Granny Made Me an Anarchist is a lively read, and his website Christie Books has a treasure trove of historical material, including a fascinating BBC interview with Christie describing his trip to Spain to deliver explosives for an assassination attempt on Franco .
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Voices of Resistance from Occupied London #5: Disorder of the Day is available to read online via the Occupied London blog . Also check out the Occupied London Collective’s 2011 book, Revolt and Crisis in Greece .
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“The Politics of Knives” is a new film about the rise of the Golden Dawn from a radical perspective.
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You can stream “The Chimneysweep” and “Antifa: Chasseurs de Skin” online; “Libertarias” you’ll have to find on your own.
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Speaking of antifa films, we just got word of a new documentary produced by German anti-fascists called “No Pasaran” , portraying an annual Nazi parade in Magdeburg, Germany and resistance to it.
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The Moscow Anarchist Black Cross page has information on how to support the four Russian anti-fascist anarchists arrested in Kazan .
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Info on the October 26th anti-fascist protest against NPI from One People’s Project and Anti-Racist Action in Washington, DC
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Political prisoners with upcoming birthdays:
Edward Goodman Africa #AM–4974
SCI Mahanoy
301 Morea Road
Frackville, Pennsylvania 17932Ed Poindexter #27767
Nebraska State Penitentiary
Post Office Box 2500
Lincoln, Nebraska 68542 -
Below is the full text of our revised “Free Speech FAQ” for use in challenging the “free speech” defense of fascists. Please take it and adapt it as you need for use in your own anti-fascist organizing! You can also read the original Free Speech FAQ from Rolling Thunder #9 , as well as the “Not Free Speech, But Freedom Itself” article, which also appears in the zine “The Divorce of Thought From Deed” .
“Stopping fascists from speaking makes you just as bad as them.”
Failing to stop fascists from speaking - that is, giving them the opportunity to organize to impose their agenda on the rest of us - makes you as bad as them. If you care about freedom, don’t stand idly by while people mobilize to take it away.
“Shouldn’t we just ignore them? They want attention, and if we give it to them we’re letting them win.”
Actually, fascists usually don’t want to draw attention to their organizing; they do most of it in secret, fearing (correctly) that an outraged public will shut them down. They only organize public events to show potential recruits that they have power, and to try to legitimize their views as part of the political spectrum. By publicly disrupting and humiliating fascists, we make it clear to them and their potential supporters that they are not in control and can’t wield the power that they glorify. Ignoring fascists only allows them to organize unhindered - a dangerous mistake. Better we shut them down once and for all.
“The best way to defeat fascism is to let them express their views so that everyone can see how ignorant they are. We can refute them more effectively with ideas than force.”
People don’t become fascists simply because they’re persuaded by their ideas. Fascism claims to offer power to those who feel threatened by shifting social and economic realities. The fact that their analysis of these shifts are ignorant misses the point; do we need to cite examples of how dumb ideas have proved massively popular throughout history? From Italy to Germany to streets around the world today, fascists haven’t gained strength through rational argument, but through organizing to wield power at the expense of others. To counter this, we can’t just argue against them; we have to prevent them from organizing by any means necessary. We can debate their ideas all day long, but if we don’t prevent them from building the capacity to make them reality, it won’t matter. Only popular self-defense, not simply debate, has succeeded in stopping fascism.
“Neo-Nazis are irrelevant; institutionalized racism poses the real threat today, not the extremists at the fringe.”
Our society’s institutions are indeed deeply racist, and our organizing must challenge and dismantle them. But the visibility of neo-Nazis and fringe fascists enables other right-wing groups to frame themselves as moderates, legitimizing their racist and xenophobic positions and the systems of power and privilege they defend. Taking a stand against fascists is an essential step toward discrediting the structures and values at the root of institutionalized racism. Plus, as we heard last episode, suit-and-tie fascists are infiltrating positions of influence in academia and politics, giving them dangerous power to advance racist policies on an institutional level.
And fascists around the world are still terrorizing and murdering people. It’s both naive and disrespectful to their victims to minimize the reality of fascist violence. Fascists act directly to carry out their agenda rather than limiting themselves to representative democracy, so even small numbers can be disproportionately dangerous, making it crucial to deal with them swiftly.
“Free speech means protecting everyone’s right to speak, including people you don’t agree with. How would you like it if you had an unpopular opinion and other people were trying to silence you?”
We oppose fascists because of what they do, not what they say. We’re not opposed to free speech; we’re opposed to enacting an agenda of hate and terror. We have no power to censor them; they continue to publish hate literature in print and on the internet. Their public events don’t exist to express views, but to build the power they need to enforce their hatred.
The government and police have never protected everyone’s free speech equally, and never will; they systematically repress views and actions that challenge existing power inequalities. They spend hundreds of thousands of public dollars on riot police and helicopters to defend a KKK rally, but for a radical demonstration the same police will be there to stop it, not to protect it; just look at the evictions of the Occupy encampments, attacks on Earth First! actions, or countless other examples. Of course anarchists don’t like being silenced by the state, but we don’t want the state to define and manage our freedom, either. The First Amendment covers what laws Congress shall or shall not enact; it’s up to us to determine what we need to do to defend ourselves. Unlike the ACLU, whose supposed defense of “freedom” leads them to support the KKK and neo-Nazis, we support self-defense and self-determination above all. What’s the purpose of free speech, if not to foster a world free from oppression? Fascists oppose this vision; thus we oppose fascism by any means necessary.
“Trying to suppress their voices will backfire by generating interest in them.”
Resistance to fascism doesn’t increase interest in fascist views. If anything, liberals mobilizing to defend fascists on free speech grounds increases interest in their views by conferring legitimacy on them. This plays directly into their organizing goals, allowing them to drive a wedge between their opponents using free speech as a smokescreen. By tolerating racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia, so-called free speech advocates are complicit in the acts of terror that fascist organizing makes possible.
“They have rights like everybody else.”
No one has the right to threaten our community with violence. Likewise, we reject the “right” of the government and police - who have more in common with fascists than they do with us - to decide for us when fascists have crossed the line from merely expressing themselves into posing an immediate threat. We will not abdicate our freedom to judge when and how to defend ourselves.