![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/24/1.jpg\")
Location 1: demonstrators blocked the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive. Location 2: an abandoned RV trailer blocked Airport Service Road.
\nOn January 23, thousands of people went on strike in the Twin Cities to oppose the ongoing campaign of kidnapping and murder that federal mercenaries have perpetrated over the past two months in service to Donald Trump’s program of ethnic cleansing. Over 1000 businesses shut down—some enthusiastically, others involuntarily. At the same time, a smaller number of demonstrators set out to prevent federal mercenaries associated with Immigration and Customs Enforcement from carrying out the abductions they had planned for the day.
\n\nEarly on the morning of January 23, in sub-zero conditions, roughly 75 demonstrators with shields and reinforced banners blocked the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive, immediately adjacent to the Bishop Henry Whipple building, which ICE has been using as their base of operations in the Twin Cities. At the same time, someone left an RV trailer blocking Airport Service Road near the north end of Federal Drive (see map). This completely blocked two of the three means of ingress and egress to and from the Whipple building. Presumably, the blockade was intended to box ICE in at the north end of Federal Drive, blocking off every point of egress, but as it played out, they still had access to one exit.
\n\nThe RV trailer blocking Airport Service Road remained in place for about half an hour. The demonstrators blocked the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive for two and a half hours.
\n\nThere was no sign of ICE or BorTac (the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, members of which have beaten and tear gassed protesters at prior actions by the Whipple building) during the entire two and a half hours. The ICE motor pool appeared almost totally full during the action, suggesting that they weren’t staging from any secondary location. It is possible that this action effectively trapped a large number of ICE agents at their headquarters.
\n\nEventually, after the trailer had been removed, Hennepin sheriffs threatened to attack the demonstrators with chemical weapons. The participants in the blockade dispersed five minutes later, before chemical weapons were deployed. Two arrests were reported in the area, apparently not in connection with the blockade at the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive.
\n\nThe role of the sheriffs is noteworthy. From Chicago to the Twin Cities, local and state police that supposedly answer to Democrat politicians have played a fundamental role in violently suppressing protests in order to enable ICE to continue kidnapping and brutalizing people. Any movement against ICE will have to contend with this bipartisanship.
\n\nTwo weeks ago, on January 8, protesters blocked the gates of the Whipple building for one hour in response to the murder of Renee Nicole Good by federal agent Jonathan Ross. Today’s attempt raises the bar. It is inspiring that thousands of people participated in today’s general strike. The blockade at the Whipple building shows that some are prepared to go further, taking bold and creative action to directly impact what ICE can and cannot do.
\n\nIn the following anonymously submitted account, participants describe what they witnessed during the blockade and offer some context for their experiences resisting the ICE occupation.
\n\n Location 1: demonstrators blocked the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive. Location 2: an abandoned RV trailer blocked Airport Service Road.
\n“It’s been the longest year of my life.” You can hear this refrain throughout the Twin Cities—and it’s only January. More than fifty days of occupation by federal forces has weighed upon the resolve and well-being of resisters and occupiers alike.
\n\nThe federal site at Fort Snelling, where the Whipple Building is located, is known for having served as a concentration camp imprisoning the Dakota people in the 1860s. This legacy continues today with the use of the site as the home base for thousands of masked kidnappers. The 3000 federal agents involved in this operation outnumber the ten largest police forces in the Twin Cities combined.
\n\nThe first abductions began as a trickle and built to a stream, then a flood like the mighty Mississippi. The most henious and evil acts are burned into our brains, reminiscent of the sort of attacks the Israeli army has carried out in the West Bank: ambushes on schools and hospitals, masked invaders using terrified children as hostages, shootings, even a public execution. The piercing tones of 3D-printed whistles are scorched onto our eardrums like tinnitus. Yet the violence of ICE has fueled a shared rage that many people never knew they were capable of. Many new resisters are waking up to this reality for the first time. Others have experienced wave after wave of struggle in the Twin Cities, which have prepared many of us for this moment.
\n\nFascism is not on the way. It is here.
\n\nIn response, people prepared to go on the offensive on the day of the general strike. This offensive involved three different struggles, none any less important than the others.
\n\nLike many on the global stage, we find ourselves in unfamiliar waters. The old rules have been thrown out the window. In the streets, ICE acts more like Nazis than like cops. This is especially apparent to those of us with experience in anti-fascist organizing. Their terroristic tactics combine a mixture of brutality and cowardice; their unpredictable nature has strained even seasoned veterans.
\n\nThis is the first form of conflict we must deal with: struggle against self.
\n\nUncertainty breeds fear. We have use threat modeling to identify what the risks are and which ones we are prepared to run. Movement tactics like positioning sharpshooters on roofs, using security checkpoints, and sending security teams to escort people through dangerous areas have become common once again, as they were in the height of the 2020 uprisings. This is the case even for large meetings now. We study and practice these skills over and over, doing our best to address our fears while seeking to assuage anguish over those who have already been disappeared.
\n\nCare must be taken when deliberating too, as frustration can easily flare up over minor or inconsequential issues. Recognizing and regulating our own emotional states is key to avoiding the tendency to act on fear. Group visualization techniques present an opportunity to imagine possible outcomes and prepare our responses in advance.
\n\nThe crime against humanity that we call genocide doesn’t just affect those who are abducted or killed. Those who remain must carry its weight. In the week leading up to the general strike, we wrestled with all of these things. Nonetheless, we pressed on.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/24/2.jpg\")
Demonstrators with shields and reinforced banners blocking the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive.
\nThere is a difference between ordinary cold and bitter cold. It’s difficult to describe if you haven’t experienced it. In the bitter cold, there is almost a serene stillness to the air, a seeming tranquility daring you to underestimate its lethality. Literal arctic chills can spread through our state. A week ahead of the general strike, it became clear that it was going to be a very cold day.
\n\nThis second form of conflict is just as dangerous as any human violence: struggle against nature.
\n\nI’ve seen one exposure death before. The glassy black skin on their body isn’t a vision I will ever forget. ICE have recently been taking a page out of the Saskatoon Police force’s “Starlight Tours” and dropping off arrestees in the middle of the night in remote areas, intentionally using weather exposure as a weapon of torture. On the morning of the general strike, temperature adjusted for wind chill was about -30 degrees Fahrenheit (-35 Celsius). This can cause uncovered skin to develop frostbite within twenty minutes, a challenge that requires careful planning and specialized clothing to address.
\n\nIn the modern surveillance state, one must also take care to avoid being identified by one’s specialized winter clothing. Despite organized warming stations, several volunteers from out of town underestimated the risks and were injured from exposure alone. There surely would have been two or three times as many participants in the blockade were it not so bitter outside.
\n\nAs in the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline, there were concerns that state or federal forces might use water as a weapon. At one point, a scout identifed and radioed out what appeared to be preparations to employ a water cannon. In this weather, with no nearby facilities to warm up in, such a weapon could inflict permanent harm. Similarly, water to flush chemical weapons can pose a risk in these temperatures.
\n\nTensions were high, but with extra jackets and handwarmers, we were able to hold the line.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/24/3.jpg\")
The RV trailor abandoned in the middle of Airport Service Road.
\nBeing across the highway from the rest of the city, the Whipple Building is difficult to reach on foot and well-protected from pedestrians. Two days before the action, our adversaries added additional layers of fencing to create chokepoints and opportunites to trap demonstrators. They put up jersey barriers and fences on either side of Federal Drive, all the way down, separating the street from the sidewalk, blocking off every driveway—creating a sort of tunnel. Understood solely as a defensive tactic, this made sense in a mindset obsessed with violence. Though it also made it easier to blockade the route, as their fortifications left them only three exit points.
\n\nFour different groups prepared to take action to blockade those points. This is the final form of conflict we must confront: struggle against the occupiers.
\n\nOne group walked in from the city and train station, carrying shields, steel banners, and other items. Their goal was to block the primary access point, diverting traffic. Arriving early, I saw items being distributed as people huddled for warmth in the exposed parking lot. At first, the numbers looked concerningly small. The group pressed forward to the chokepoint, occupying the area before the tunnel. The demonstrators could not get in, but the mercenaries would not get out.
\n\nPerhaps the latter had not prepared for this mutual achievement of goals. In any case, the only forces that these demonstrators encountered were three squad cars from the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department. The federal forces remained holed up in the building, apparently afraid to step into the cold. The demonstrators chanted and taunted them to draw their ire; still, federal agents did not show themselves. They took no offensive action of any kind.
\n\nPerhaps the federal agents, too, are exhausted from their long campaign of contemptible violence. Perhaps they were stretched thin from preparing to deal with the general strike. Perhaps they were more afraid of nature than the demonstrators were. Or perhaps they were obeying strict orders from their commanding officers not to engage, for reasons we can only speculate about.
\n\nIn any case, it was unusual that they did not attack the blockade. The participants successfully retained all the equipment and supplies they had brought out to the action, which is unusual for such confrontations.
\n\nWhile that group held the city entrance, other groups took coordinated action elsewhere. One group towed blockading material into the highway entrance. The first convoy in this group apparently deployed an RV trailer and exited the area. A second convoy in the group left the area without deploying any sort of barricade, as sheriffs swarmed the trailer at the last second. The single RV trailer that remained nonetheless obstructed egress for nearly half an hour.
\n\nFinally, two other groups provided support and a human blockade on a side road. Unfortunately, sheriffs carried out two arrests there during an agressive push towards the fortified “tunnel.” Reportedly, snowballs were thrown at federal vehicles, shattering one window. Ice versus ICE.
\n\nAfter tear gas was deployed, many of the people in this area began coming over to the primary blockade, reinforcing the numbers at the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive.
\n\nAs the hard barricades were cleared and others poured in, the demonstrators took a moment to consider the situation. They had already achieved their objectives for the day, coordinating between several groups and seizing the opportunity of the general strike as a whole to grind things to a halt at the Whipple building. Given the opportunity to leave without sustaining losses, they chose to take it, leaving before weapons were deployed. They marched back as a single unit in a tactical retreat, still protected by shields and steel banners, chanting “Minnesota’s got the ICE melt!”
\n\nFor two and a half hours, demonstrators had blocked all but one of the routes in and out of the Whipple building.
\n\nToday’s action only strengthens our resolve. Now we have more experience coordinating with one another and more knowledge of the terrain. The fact that federal forces did not show themselves reinforces the notion that they are not prepared to defend themselves in large confrontations—or at least, that they consider it preferable to avoid doing so. Their continued reliance on state police and sheriffs poses complicated strategic questions for us, but it could also create complications for them in the future.
\n\nAs local comrades recently stated in regards to Donald Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act:
\n\n\n\n\n“We must continue to organize communities, patrol our streets and build rapid response teams, push for workplace stoppages, and grind them down every step of the way. We must exact a price for every footprint they leave in our snow. When we have the opportunity, we will drive them from our streets and tear down their concentration camp. ICE will melt when the heat turns up.”
\n
Forever yours in struggle.
\n\nCongratulations on surviving 2025 and welcome to our year in review report! What did we accomplish this year? Let’s review!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/8.jpg\")
\nIn the United States, the year 2025 arrived like a nightmare. Danger. Terror. Hatred. All of the worst elements of humanity had taken power and were preparing to use the institutions of the state to inflict tremendous harm. War was already raging in Ukraine, genocides underway from Palestine to Sudan. How much worse could it get?
\n\nWe, at least, were not taken by surprise. Four years ago, looking back on the debacle of January 6, 2021, we anticipated Trump’s return; when Elon Musk bought Twitter, we pointed out that his purchase resolved the fundamental conflict within the capitalist class, between Silicon Valley and Trump’s authoritarian nationalism; by summer 2024, we sensed what was coming:
\n\n\n\n\nDonald Trump will win the election. Then all the institutions that centrists have counted on to protect them—electoral politics, the court system, the police, ordinary citizens’ inclination to obey the law and respect the authorities—will become weapons in the hands of their enemies. Of course, many of us already experience these institutions as our adversaries. Biden’s supporters will have to ask themselves whether they are willing to work alongside us against them, or if, in fact, they prefer fascism to freedom.
\n
Despite these warnings, the opening months of Trump’s second administration shocked many people who had foolishly expected a rerun of Trump’s first presidency, not the sudden arrival of a much more destructive and cynical strategy of governance. Others remain in denial to this day, assuring themselves that however bad things have gotten, they cannot possibly continue to get worse at such a pace.
\n\nOn the contrary, we remain convinced that only grassroots action can change the trajectory we are on.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/6.jpg\")
First, they came for the immigrants. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement mercenaries.
\nNot everyone had the good fortune to survive 2025. Police officers murdered well over 1200 people in the United States in 2025. Dozens more perished in ICE custody. Hundreds of thousands of people have been brutally snatched from their communities, held in abominable conditions, and deported. The cuts that Elon Musk and his flunkies made to aid programs have reportedly already inflicted many hundreds of thousands of deaths. Countless more will follow as the autocrats continue to “streamline” the state to play a purely repressive function.
\n\nNonetheless, as we have documented, the assault has reached a plateau, if not yet an impasse. It is time to get our bearings, identify the vulnerabilities that our oppressors have opened up by demolishing the concessions that their predecessors made, and launch a counterattack that could propel us into an entirely different future.
\n\nFor a full accounting of the struggle in the United States throughout 2025, consult our retrospective, “At the Turning of the Tide.” For more background, revisit the events of 2024.
\n\nWe began 2025 with two foundational texts proposing how to come to grips with the rise of autocracy.
\n\n“It’s Safer in the Front: Taking the Offensive against Tyranny” makes the case that, facing ascendant fascism, it is more dangerous to try to avoid confrontation than it is to go on the offensive. Bringing together a series of anecdotes from the front lines of a quarter of a century of anarchist mobilizations, this text also offers a brief overview of the ways that repression has ramped up since the 20th century.
\n\nThe second text, “Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace,” argues that, rather than powerlessly accusing Donald Trump and his cronies of lawlessness, our best hope is to organize concrete acts of resistance on a horizontal and participatory basis. In other words, to become anarchists.
\n\nIn June, we followed these with a third text, “Mutual Aid, the Commons, and the Revolutionary Abolition of Capitalism,” revisiting the distinction between charity and mutual aid in hopes of unlocking the revolutionary potential concealed within the latter.
\n\nWe concluded the year with the aforementioned analysis, “At the Turning of the Tide.”
\n\nIf you only have time to read a few things we’ve published this year, start with these four.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/06/05/2.jpg\")
From “Mutual Aid, the Commons, and the Revolutionary Abolition of Capitalism.” Click on the image to read the essay.
\nEarly in 2025, we published a report on the student walkouts in Los Angeles, one of the first signs of life from what became a powerful movement.
\n\nOver the following weeks, we published a text from a bus driver facing austerity measures, titled “The Only Immigrant Trying to Steal My Job Is Elon Musk,” followed by a reflection on the federal kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil.
\n\nWhen a wave of resistance to ICE gathered momentum in June, we published reports from participants in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Austin, Texas, Chicago, and Seattle. In fall 2025, when ICE concentrated their violence on Chicago, we published a report from the blockades at the Broadview holding facility, followed eventually by reflections on the efforts to target that facility.
\n\nWhen ICE agents returned to the Twin Cities, people confronted them once more.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/3.jpg\")
By the end of the year, the student walkouts had spread from Los Angeles to Charlotte, North Carolina.
\nIn March, we published the final installment in our series chronicling the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, Georgia. In July, as Stop Cop City defendant Ayla King prepared to go to trial, we published an overview of the absurdly tenuous case against Ayla and the other RICO defendants. Almost all of the charges have since been dropped, though the threat of future state persecution still hangs over the heads of the accused.
\n\nFollowing up last year’s campus occupations in solidarity with Gaza, we covered a daring Palestine solidarity occupation at the University of Washington in May. In October, we published a statement from a participant in the Thousand Madleens to Gaza flotilla, followed by an account of the direct action campaign that shut down Elbit Systems—Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer—in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
\n\nFinally, as we do every year, we observed Steal Something from Work Day—this time, by celebrating employees who shared company goods with the general public during a time of need.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/01/20/header.jpg\")
The weekend of the Festivals of Resistance was the anniversary of the brutal police murder of Tortuguita, a participant in the movement to Stop Cop City. Mourners courageously redecorated this billboard in the middle of New York City in Tortuguita’s memory.
\nAt the end of December 2024, we called for people to organize “Festivals of Resistance” the weekend immediately before Trump was to take office, in order to share skills and prepare for the onslaught. Over two dozen cities hosted events in response to this call. Afterwards, we published reportbacks from some of them.
\n\nWe published a call to take action on May Day, as well, and a call for anti-authoritarian blocs at the October 18 “No Kings” demonstrations around the country. Afterwards, we reached out to participants in a dozen cities and towns to learn how their efforts went and published a collection of their reflections.
\n\nFinally, we published a reportback from the Florida Abolitionist Gathering.
\n\nAnarchists at one No Kings rally led the entire crowd off the sidewalk and on a spirited march throughout the city.
\nEarly in 2025, we published a short guide titled “Eight Things You Can Do to Stop ICE.” Copies of the trifold version appeared everywhere—for example, during the disruption of a US Customs and Border Protection recruiting event in Chicago.
\n\nTen months later, drawing on the experiences of Chicago organizers, we followed up with “Standing Up to ICE,” a guide spelling out the steps a community can take to stand in the way of ICE kidnappings on a large scale.
\n\nIn between, we published “A Demonstrator’s Guide to Operational Security: Fighting Back, Staying Free,” a comprehensive guide to maintaining your anonymity while engaging in street actions, as well as “A Demonstrator’s Guide to Reinforced Banners” and “A Demonstrator’s Guide to Lockdowns and Blockades.”
\n\nIn addition, in response to Donald Trump’s cartoonish announcement that his administration would be designating “Antifa” [sic] a “major [?!] terrorist organization,” we circulated\n“Safeguarding Our Movements against Repression,” spelling out steps that organizations, activists, and others who oppose fascism can take to be ready to endure an authoritarian crackdown. If such a crackdown has not yet taken place, we owe that chiefly to the resistance that has tied down federal mercenaries on other fronts, as we argued at the end of the year:
\n\n\n\n\nIf federal agencies have yet to move with full force against a target other than immigrants, it is only because people have fought so hard to obstruct ICE. This drives home the true meaning of solidarity: the best way to protect ourselves tomorrow is to protect each other today.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/1.jpg\")
Demonstrators outside the Broadview holding facility. They’re in there for us, we’re out here for them.
\nBetween May and July, we published a series of texts from the Mideast, including a reflection on what the Rajaee Port disaster in Iran revealed about the systematic racism that Baluch ethnic minorities face; a statement from Iranian, Kurdish, and Afghani feminists arguing against reductive positions in regards to the conflict between Israel and Iran; and an analysis of what the decision of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK) to lay down their arms means for the whole region.
\n\nIn August, a wave of protest against austerity spread across Indonesia, then escalated dramatically in response to the police murder of Affan Kurniawan, a 21-year-old delivery worker. While the Indonesian government managed to reestablish control, a few days later, a similar eruption toppled the government of Nepal, setting a template for what became known as the “Gen Z uprisings,” a series of revolts from Madagascar to Peru.
\n\nWe published an interview with anarchists in Nepal who participated in the revolution, followed by an article by another Nepali about the new horizons it opened up. The following month, we published an interview with participants in the subsequent uprising in Morocco, as well.
\n\nWhile conditions in the United States and Europe have been grim, these distant fires suggest that the age of uprisings is not over. The plumes of smoke rising from the horizon today hint at events that could break out much closer to home tomorrow. It is urgent to think through what lasting gains movements can achieve during such surges of activity in an era when the apparatus of the state has proven incapable of reform.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/2.jpg\")
Indonesia.
\nOur most ambitious historical project of the year was “Anarchists in the Movement against Police and White Supremacy,” tracing anarchist contributions to uprisings against white supremacist policing from the Los Angeles riots of 1992 to the George Floyd Uprising of 2020.
\n\nWe also published a collection of reflections from participants in the Seattle Solidarity Network on their seventeen years of organizing to support laborers and renters in their struggles with bosses and landlords.
\n\nSeeking to equip people for the urgent struggles of 2025, we published a text about the General Strike of May Day 2006, one of the high-water marks in the fight against the oppression of immigrants in the United States, and two articles about how people organized to shut down the machinery of deportation in France in the 1990s. Both of the articles were adapted from the newly published book Another War Was Possible, a firsthand account of anarchist street action at the turn of the century, to which we contributed the preface.
\n\nFinally, we shared a eulogy for Karl Garside, a lifelong participant in the animal liberation movement.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/05/28/header.jpg\")
A scene from the uprising of 2020.
\nThis year, via our Ex-Worker podcast, we released audio versions of a handful of our articles, including “It’s Safer in the Front,” “Become an Anarchist or Forever Hold Your Peace,” “Mutual Aid, the Commons, and the Revolutionary Abolition of Capitalism,” “Safeguarding Our Movements against Repression,” and our coverage of the origins of the wave of resistance to ICE in Minneapolis to Los Angeles.
\n\nWe also collaborated with subMedia and the Coordinadora Anarquista Tejiendo Libertad on a video and poster campaign to counter ICE recruitment.
\n\nMERCENARIES: A Video and Poster Campaign to Counter ICE Recruitment
\nWe published a work of speculative fiction, “Survival: A Story about Anarchists Enduring Mass Raids.” We also designed a poster in homage to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, the “street gang with an analysis” that introduced the concept of the affinity group to English-speaking anarchists in the 1960s.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/9.jpg\")
\nIn 2025, we released our first record in over a decade—the album “Hope against Hope” by Catharsis, long known as one of the world’s most extreme and uncompromising underground hardcore bands. The first pressing of the LP sold out immediately, but we will have a second pressing available soon. You can read an array of reviews of the record here, or read Kim Kelly’s interview with members of the band.
\n\nCatharsis supported the album with tours on the East Coast of the United States and in Europe, and has further tours scheduled in 2026. The vast majority of the other music we have released over the past thirty years is available here, all of it free of charge.
\n\nCatharsis: “Hope against Hope.”
\nWe also published a text written by the surviving members of the Russian hardcore band Sandinista! in memory of their bandmate, Timur Kacharava, on the twenty-year anniversary of his murder at the hands of fascists.
\n\nFinally, we reprinted our Contradictionary, alongside other print projects.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/12/30/7.jpg\")
\nHere follows a more or less comprehensive list of the zines, posters, and articles we published in 2025 in different languages, organized from most recent to oldest.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/at-the-turning-of-the-tide/at-the-turning-of-the-tide_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/make-ready-safeguarding-our-movements-against-repression/make-ready-safeguarding-our-movements-against-repression_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/chicago-against-ice-la-migra-la-policia-la-misma-porqueria/chicago-against-ice-la-migra-la-policia-la-misma-porqueria_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/resistance-reader/resistance-reader_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/minneapolis-to-feds-get-the-fuck-out-how-people-in-the-twin-cities-responded-to-a-federal-raid/minneapolis-to-feds-get-the-fuck-out-how-people-in-the-twin-cities-responded-to-a-federal-raid_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/seven-steps-to-stop-ice/seven-steps-to-stop-ice_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. (Español) \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/it-is-fascism-start-acting-like-it/it-is-fascism-start-acting-like-it_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. (Español) \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/melt-ice-be-water/melt-ice-be-water_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/los-angeles-stands-up-to-ice-a-firsthand-report-on-the-clashes-of-june-6/los-angeles-stands-up-to-ice-a-firsthand-report-on-the-clashes-of-june-6_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/mutual-aid-the-commons-and-the-revolutionary-abolition-of-capitalism/mutual-aid-the-commons-and-the-revolutionary-abolition-of-capitalism_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/cop-city-is-everywhere/cop-city-is-everywhere_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/survival/survival_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/remember-2020-we-can-win/remember-2020-we-can-win_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/become-an-anarchist-or-forever-hold-your-peace/become-an-anarchist-or-forever-hold-your-peace_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/8-things-you-can-do-to-stop-ice/8-things-you-can-do-to-stop-ice_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. (Español) \n | \n\n\n\n ![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/its-safer-in-the-front/its-safer-in-the-front_front.jpg\") \n \n \n\n Click on the image to download the zine. \n | \n
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\nTwenty years ago, on November 13, 2005, Timur Kacharava, an anti-fascist and a hardcore musician, was murdered in a barbaric attack by neo-Nazis in the very center of St. Petersburg, Russia. Although for us, his death was not only a huge personal loss, but also an event that largely determined the further trajectory of our lives, we do not want this text to read as an obituary, a sentimental memoir, or a biographical note. The goal we are pursuing transcends all personal experience and individual biography.
\n\nIn his Theses on the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin left us a secret key to understanding how an appeal to the losses and unrealized possibilities of the past could operate. He argued that such an action can interrupt the linear course of historical time, suspend the present for a moment, however brief, and fill it with liberating significance. He called this “a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.” Weak, because it has no external, transcendent justification beyond the logic immanent in historical processes. Messianic, because it can be transformed into action that brings humanity closer to liberation.
\n\nBy appealing to events that took place twenty years ago, we want to speak to the present and, first and foremost, to our friends and to those who may become our friends. Today, as neoliberal capitalism is rapidly transforming into outright fascism, we recognize the messianic appeal and acknowledge an obligation to interpret our own experience of loss and defeat as a collective promise charged with hope.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/11/17/1.jpg\")
Timur Kacharava in September 2005.
\nIn the late 1990s and early 2000s, as teenagers who had recently graduated from high school and started university, we first learned about the independent hardcore punk scene. Although St. Petersburg’s underground music scene had always been disruptive and diverse, this discovery was a real revelation for us. We encountered something that, as it seemed to us at the time, far surpassed musical subculture. Our spontaneous rejection of the world around us took on a constructive shape for the first time in our embracing of hardcore punk and DIY ethics. Music ceased to be an end in itself and became a form of being-together, a tool for building a community that existed according to its own autonomous rules in spite of cultural differences and state borders.
\n\nThese rules and principles were interpreted in different ways and took shape in constant disputes and disagreements and were influenced by the ideas of anti-fascism, veganism, and straight edge, actively practiced in our environment. In our own place of residence, we had to create this environment from scratch with our own limited resources: organizing concerts, publishing zines, distributing CDs and cassettes among interested friends and acquaintances. This unalienated activity gradually became for us a glimpse of another possible world, a point of entry into anti-fascism and anarcho-communism, a springboard to political action.
\n\nWe met Timur when he was only 14. This encounter, due to happenstance, was transformed into profound friendship and collective music making. Timur took from us what we had only recently taken from others. He was recording large quantities of tapes and CDs and photocopying various punk, hardcore, and anarchist publications.
\n\nWe rehearsed together long and hard, trying to learn to play instruments and create what would later be known as Sandinista! We walked together through the night city, its parks, outskirts, forests, and seashores. We listened to music, read Heartattack!, Inside Front, and Vzorvanoe Nebo [Exploded Sky], exchanged recordings, argued, participated in the first anti-fascist actions, prepared and distributed food to the homeless, and traveled to punk festivals and concerts in Moscow, Minsk, Warsaw, Riga, Vilnius, Prague, Pilsen, and Berlin. Our collaborative music-making gradually came to discover its own language, initially influenced by heavy hardcore bands of the 1990s such as Unbroken and “Rather Be Dead”-era Refused and later moved closer to the more raw and politicized hardcore/punk in the vein of Econochrist, Tragedy, and Catharsis.
\n\nToday, these recordings are still relevant to us both musically and substantially as a token of collective work whose overall result always exceeds the sum of the individual effort that was invested in it. At the same time, it is important to note that the final form of these songs should largely be credited to Timur’s restless enthusiasm and musical talent.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/11/17/2.jpg\")
Timur and Julia in 2003.
\nUnlike what was then a still emerging, small-scale anti-fascist movement, radical nationalists and neo-Nazis in Russia in the early 2000s had a developed infrastructure, their own combat units, and mass support among football hooligans. The murders of migrants, pogroms, and other crimes they committed often not only went unprosecuted but also received silent approval from the authorities and law enforcement.
\n\nWithout any tradition to fall back on, the anti-fascist movement in Russia initially developed from scratch, based on spontaneous reactions to neo-Nazi atrocities as a small and completely grassroots youth initiative. The official Soviet version of anti-fascism had by then completely lost all relevance and therefore had almost no relation to its emergence.
\n\nIn the early 2000s, Russia went through various stages of consolidation of state power and strengthening of law enforcement structures after the criminal redistribution of property and mass privatization of the 1990s. The role of nationalist rhetoric in these processes and the connection between the state apparatus and nationalist organizations were emotionally yet accurately described in several analytical articles by the anti-fascist civil rights activist Stanislav Markelov.
\n\nIn his essay “Patriotism as a Diagnosis,” he describes patriotism backed up by the criminal state as a disease of society, a tool for depoliticizing and maintaining a passive condition of silent majority and a tactic to distract attention from the real problem of growing social inequality.
\n\nMarkelov is best known as the lawyer of the plaintiff on the high-profile trial of colonel Budanov, who was accused of raping and murdering Elza Kungayeva, a teenage girl from Chechnya. Markelov’s uncompromising stance on nationalism and his consistent support for anti-fascists caused strong irritation not only among representatives of neo-Nazi groups, but also among nationalist-minded military and representatives of law enforcement structures.
\n\nOn January 19, 2009, several years after the murder of Timur Kacharava, Stanislav Markelov was murdered by a gunshot in the head in the center of Moscow. He was accompanied by a journalist, anti-fascist and environmental activist Anastasia Baburova. She was fatally wounded by shots and died in the hospital later the same day.
\n\nDuring the investigation, it was found that behind the murders of Markelov and Baburova was a neo-Nazi group, the Russian Nationalist Combat Organization. This group was later recognized as responsible for the murders of at least ten other people: anti-fascists, migrants, law enforcement officers, and martial arts athletes of non-Russian origin. Members of the group had access to the addresses and photographs of\nleft-wing activists from the database of the Russian Interior Ministry’s Center for Countering Extremism, and one of the group’s members had been a former Federal Security Service (FSB) employee.
\n\nAccording to our information, the attack on Timur was also not accidental and his killers were hunting him down specifically. We do not know for sure what caused such intense attention. Perhaps Timur turned heads at one of the anti-fascist actions by his striking appearance and eccentric behavior; it is also possible that his markedly non-Russian, in fact Georgian surname attracted attention. We can be certain that Timur had former friends who became neo-Nazis and knew his name and identity.
\n\nThe bloody street clashes between neo-Nazis and anti-fascists in Russia came to an end when the state completely monopolized the right to use violence. Right-wing radicals who did not fit into the system at that point became an irritation to the authoritarian regime and were crushed by repression. Those of them who proved their loyalty became part of the repressive apparatus themselves. The anti-fascist movement, on the other hand, turned into a full-on enemy of the state, which to this day is systematically persecuted, as we can see, for example, in the “Network” case. and more recent “Tyumen” case.
\n\nStanislav Markelov’s articles are important for understanding how the depoliticization, collapse of social relations, and resentment-based patriotism that accompanied the rise of capitalism contributed to the strengthening of an authoritarian political regime built around a cult of brute power. In 2022, these processes led to an aggressive imperialist war in Ukraine, the possibility of which Markelov was also able to foresee in his writings.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/11/17/4.jpg\")
An anti-fascist memorial action in St. Petersburg in the early 2000s.
\nAt first glance, it may seem that the struggle we waged was meaningless and doomed to fail from the outset. Today, we find ourselves in a world turned upside down, with appearances becoming more important than actual messages, language being emptied of meaning, and many concepts getting so subverted as to lose all significance. This emptiness simultaneously breeds suspicion of everything and, paradoxically, forces one to believe in the most irrational explanations of what is happening. In such a world, the fight against Nazism becomes a cover for imperialist ambitions that raze entire cities to the ground, while opposition to antisemitism is used to justify unprecedented genocide and cultural racism, which makes those who do not share a certain set of cultural values unworthy of all sympathy and deprives them of human status.
\n\nThe distorted mirror of representation, which has completely replaced lived reality, is a direct consequence of the aestheticization of politics, which Benjamin, already mentioned above, had warned about at the very dawn of our era.
\n\nContemporary capitalism is a continuation and a new stage in the development of the society of the Spectacle, which has become a Spectacle of technologically mediated communication; it has proved capable of absorbing, assimilating, distorting, and putting to use almost any liberating, potentially revolutionary idea.
\n\nIn his Practical Reason (1972), Pierre Bourdieu used the term doxa to refer to generally accepted truths and judgments that are not subject to questioning or critical reflection. He contrasts doxa with opinion—that which can be openly challenged and discussed. We must admit that many of our dreams have become the doxa of the left-liberal mainstream, the currency of cultural wars that numb and disarm us in the face of the real civil war that capital is waging against us with unwavering success.
\n\nBut to remember is to fight. This slogan of German anti-fascists, Erinnern heißt kämpfen, is not only a reference to the past. It is even more a call to action in the present. The memory of fallen comrades has no collective dimension unless it becomes part of the struggle, unless it recognizes and feels the “weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.” We continue to disavow this corrupt and distorted world and call on you to fight for a new one, to fight alongside us, to fight better, more consciously, and more consistently than we have. We remain with those who are the living, with those who refuse to be victims, who refuse to bargain their oppression, who are ready to sacrifice themselves in this struggle against the multi-headed monster. But we ask you not to forget that even if we strike one of its heads, we can never be sure that a new one will not appear in its place. Our main goal is to strike the hydra in its heart. This heart is the very production of neoliberal subjectivity, the formatting of our relationships, ways of thinking, and lifestyles by capitalism.
\n\nDon’t forget that when we go on stage, we all become part of the Spectacle. So avoid identity, this hidden symbolic currency. People who refuse to play the identity game cannot be fully recognized in—and as—the system and therefore pose an invisible but real threat to it. Rejecting the omnipresent identity politics allows us to see each human being not as a collection of predetermined settings, but as a possibility, thus opening up a universalist dimension of living and being together.
\n\nGo into the shadows, be anonymous and invisible, look for safe ways to communicate, look for spaces that are inaccessible to control and surveillance. Hide in the cracks and crevices of this world. Only in such spaces are true friendship and real international solidarity possible today; only there can the living word and uncorrupted art exist, and communism still be possible.
\n\n\n\n\nNEIN, NO, NET!
\n\nNein! No! Net! That was the cry of those whose children were being murdered. That was the cry of the children who were frightened by the knocking on the door at night and the smell of blood, the knocking on the door at night and the smell. Stop them! stop! Stop them! stop! They don’t know they need freedom. They’ve forgotten that we need… Freedom! You are! My body! Libertad tu eres mi cuerpo! If we give nothing ourselves, we lock them in a cage. If we are incapable of sacrifice, then our way of life is a prison. And the more things and words we have in it, the sooner we all will suffocate. Libertad tu eres mi cuerpo! I still believe, i still know. I will be, i exist.
\n
NEIN, NO, НЕТ! You can find this song on bandcamp here.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/11/17/3.jpg\")
You can download the Sandinista! album here.
\nThe laws targeting queer and trans people that are proliferating across the United States are a symptom of a much deeper and more insidious reaction, the inevitable outgrowth of a deeply repressive and hierarchical society confronting the possibility of collapse. Today’s gender fascism is not confined to the policies of a single political party. It takes different forms across the political spectrum, bringing together essentialist narratives about identity, a resurgent patriarchal mythos, and the persisting power of the state.
\n\nThis is not the first time that a reactionary society has sought scapegoats. Like our predecessors in the early twentieth century, if we hope to survive, we have to combat these forces on every level, using a wide range of strategies and tools.
\n\nIn the following ecstatic history, our comrades revisit queer resistance to the Nazis, seeking tactics and inspiration for our own troubled times.
\n\n\n\n\n“They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call into question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.”
\n\n-Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
\n
The following stories were first presented at a private memorial in honor of Heather Heyer, a year after she was murdered by a Nazi in Charlottesville in Black August 2017. Versions of this text have been presented twice since, in Seattle and Montreal. We present it here to continue that work of memory.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/08/19/3.jpg\")
A collage by Claude Cahun.
\nA thriving homosexual underground existed before the rise of the Third Reich and survived during it—just as complex and fecund as the underground that blossomed before AIDS and was all but exterminated by the crisis around the virus. In both cases, most of the traces that are available to us were lovingly preserved by insurgent faggot scholars and mystics.1
\n\nIn the genocides inflicted on the gay underworlds of Weimar Germany and the decade of Gay Liberation activity that existed between the Stonewall uprising and the onset of the AIDS crisis, the revolutionaries died first, swept up in the death machines of the state. Fredy Perlman called those machines Leviathan. In the process of studying Leviathan, Perlman developed an analysis of nationalism illustrating how the drive to sacrifice entire populations serves as the basis on which to forge a nation. This sacrifice—holocaust—sanctifies and upholds the power of the state.
\n\nThe Nazi movement inherited the most advanced techniques of repression developed by the inquisitors, witch hunters, colonialists, slave-masters, industrialists, authoritarian revolutionaries, racial mystics, and other stewards of Leviathan. They drew on these sources to establish new regimes of consensus reality shaped through ritual and aesthetics and fed on blood. Inspired by the racism of chattel slavery, Nazism emulated the example set by Lenin and Stalin, turning the machinery of the state against the population in order to forge a nation by liquidating its internal colonies. Though the Nazi regime was apparently defeated in the Second World War, the victors continued its Leviathanic project, inheriting the same legacy of colonialism and genocidal nation-building. It should be no surprise, then, that the Nazi spirit has persisted in various permutations ever since. We see it in high definition, inflicted upon Gaza every day.
\n\nLike the gods, worlds—in the plural—die and are reborn in an unending dance. Some of the worlds forced underground by the progressive march of Leviathan are blossoming again. Over the last decade, the United States has been rocked by unprecedented Black insurrection and prison strikes, struggles to defend the sacred earth from resource extraction, and revolt in island colonies like Puerto Rico. At the same time, yet another wave of white supremacist terror has arisen in response. Whiteness, which constitutes itself through the exclusion and destruction of the Other just as the state does, has reasserted its access to the terror by which it originally came to be.
\n\nThrough the open door of this inquiry, we seek to glimpse one of the many worlds destroyed by the machinery of Leviathan. We will be traveling into a queer underworld that reached its zenith just before the Nazi Party seized state power, a gay resistance that fought a life-and-death struggle against the Third Reich. Very few of the queer insurgents of that time survived; most remain unknown to us today. To proceed, we must call the dead to the amphitheater and let them speak.
\n\nOur sources have left us precious few written traces. We begin our inquiry by consulting the revolutionaries of the Gay Liberation era.
\n\nIn an interview for Christopher Street Magazine in 1980, on the cusp of the AIDS crisis, Guy Hocquenghem and Mark Blasius discussed the challenges of cobbling together a history for the gay community in the process of coming out.
\n\n\n\n\nGuy: You know, there was a gay community in Germany before the Nazi period which had all the characteristics of the community we have now—including community centers, balls, newspapers, a scientific research institute—everything. I am struck by the ignorance among gay people about the past—no, more even than ignorance: the “will to forget” the German gay holocaust. That we forgot about these hundreds of thousands of people and about the fact that out of one hundred years of gay life, in thirty of them we had a virtual vacuum—that we forgot in such a radical way is, I think, something of a warning. This has happened to no other minority. Even the Armenian genocide was remembered at least by the Armenians. But we aren’t even the only ones who remember, we don’t remember! So we find ourselves beginning at zero in each generation. Our lesson from history, then, is that we can’t be sure we won’t be suppressed. […]
\n\nMark: We know from experience that it is possible to completely destroy a sexual minority: it is not even a question of being hidden, but of continuing to exist. When we become invisible and act just like heterosexuals, we cease to exist: we lose any historical significance as well as any real expression in the daily life of society.
\n\nGuy: As long as gay genocide is not officially acknowledged, it could happen again. This is not to say that it will happen, but that somehow the political forces against us can keep it in mind. Perhaps I sound like a doomsayer. But if you put these two ideas together—gays having become “visible” in American society without having acquired significant political protection or status, and this new role of “scapegoat,” replacing the traditional scapegoats. […]
\n\nMark: As though gay liberation of the past ten years is a dream from which we will soon awaken. Underlying our professed self-confidence, there is a deep feeling of frailty—that we are living on borrowed time.
\n
This exchange strikes us as particularly haunting. In the twilight of the gay liberation period, when the AIDS genocide was poised to “come out” in turn, Hocquenghem prophesied the catastrophe waiting to be unveiled. At the time, Hocquenghem was engaged in a sustained reading of Walter Benjamin; a reproduction of Klee’s Angelus Novus, the Angel of History, hung on the wall of his Paris apartment. His book L’Âme atomique shows Benjamin’s continued Messianic influence on his thinking. Thanks to the publication of Max Fox’s translation of Hocquenghem’s final book, The Amphitheater of the Dead, we can read Hocquenghem’s deathbed recollections of his own initiation into the homosexual and revolutionary undergrounds that preceded the Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire (FHAR), his invocation of his dead, and a fleeting fantasy of a suspended life that never arrived.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/08/19/12.jpg\")
Guy Hocquenghem.
\nGuy was a youthful star in the FHAR constellation, but we’ll need to shine others’ light on this mystery to see further into the past. Undoubtedly, what Guy knew about the gay counterculture of pre-Nazi Germany was transmitted to him by the eldest member of the movement, Daniel Guérin.
\n\nGuérin was a gay anarchist who produced a number of important anarchist historical works. His final book, Homosexualité et révolution, offers theoretical proposals derived from a lifetime’s travels through the revolutionary and homosexual undergrounds. For now, we pass by his theoretical and historical work to consult the memoirs he wrote in the final year of the Weimar Republic and first year of the Third Reich. Due to obstacles to publishing homoerotic material, these records were nearly lost, but they have been recovered and translated by Robert Schwartzwald as The Brown Plague: Travels in late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany. Schwartzwald’s work offers context, showing that while Guérin was initiated politically by attending a riot in solidarity with Sacco and Vanzetti, it was his first trip to Germany that really offered him entry into the homosexual underworld.
\n\nAs a teenager, like many other homosexuals from around the world, Guérin traveled to Germany to participate in its unique queer subculture. He returned to Germany in 1932 and 1933 following that same erotic impulse, sublimating it into his interest in “the most organized working class in the world.” In the documents, Schwartzwald presents Guérin as a Virgil guiding us through the underworld before and after what he calls the Catastrophe.
\n\nIn the following exploration, we also owe thanks to the gay anarchist poet Ian Young, who published an article titled “Gay Resistance: Homosexuals in the Anti-Nazi Underground” in Gay Sunshine Magazine in winter 1977. That article was revised in 1986 and published in the Gay Sunshine anthology, Gay Roots. Taken together, these inquiries paint a living, breathing picture of queer life at the cusp of this catastrophe.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/08/19/6.jpg\")
\nGuérin unpacks the draw that Germany held for a young revolutionary homosexual. He wanted to see the organized and virile workers’ movement that had emerged in that country, anticipating a revolutionary clash with the fascists on an epic scale. “The old world was disintegrating and the time had come to risk everything,” he writes.
\n\nWhat he found was much more complicated. The leftist Parties—both Social Democrats and Communists—were unable to halt the spread of what he came to term the brown plague. He documents the sectarian and ideological operations of the respective parties, showing how the Communists acquiesced to the rise of the Nazi Party because they foolishly imagined that Nazi repression would mobilize the working class toward proletarian revolution. Many considered a Nazi regime a necessary step toward a socialist state, itself allegedly a step toward a stateless society.
\n\nAt the same time, Guérin records encounter after encounter with vagabond youth excluded from employment or adventurously dropping out of a society they regarded with enmity. Guérin claimed that in 1932, half a million vagabond youth wandered the German countryside. Before the Catastrophe, this was known as the Wandervogel movement, a ferment of free love, communal living, ecological consciousness, nudity, vegetarianism, and mysticism that prefigured the counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/08/19/1.jpg\")
Participants in the Wandervogel movement.
\nIn “The Undying Appeal of White Nationalism,” first published in the journal Black Seed (described successively as a journal of Green and then Indigenous Anarchism), James Joshua argues that this movement gave rise to many racist and nationalist thinkers inspired by the image of Aryan youth returning to inhabit the so-called natural world, and, in so doing, set the foundations for a new form of life that Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt would call a new “Nomos (order) of the Earth.” Joshua identifies this youth movement as a crucial ancestor of the Nazi doctrine of blood and soil and the template Hitler used to create the Hitler Youth.
\n\nImmediately preceding Ian Young’s account of gay resistance in the Gay Roots anthology is a text about the nationalist thinker Hans Blüher, who wrote The German Wandervogel Movement as an Erotic Phenomenon at age 24. In contradiction to Magnus Hirschfeld, the Social Democrat and sexuality researcher who proposed that homosexuals and street queens constitute a third gender (urnings), Blüher proposed that homosexual masculinity and male bonding could form a new Männerbund—a secret society of men—that could constitute a new world order from the ashes of a decadent Weimar. Blüher himself went on to support the Nazi party, believing he had found exactly such a masculine assemblage in the Sturmabteilung (SA), and only withdrew his support after the infamous “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934, the purge of SA leadership that was retroactively justified on homophobic grounds. Prior to that night, an uneasy and ambiguous relationship existed between right-wing segments of the homosexual movement and the Nazi party. Hitler himself initially responded to an emerging scandal around the sexuality of Ernst Röhm, the SA chief, by saying that what he did in his bedroom was a private manner. This ambiguity was settled with the bloody spilt in 1934 and the shift to a more draconian enforcement of Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code—the statute prohibiting “lewd and lascivious” acts between men—in 1935.
\n\nAs a Jewish leftist and a proponent of a non-masculinist conception of homosexuality, Magnus Hirschfeld could read the writing on the wall. He fled Germany in 1930, three years before the Nazis looted and burned his Institute for Sexual Research and its acclaimed archive. Others were more ambivalent. While Hirschfeld’s scientific and rights-oriented approach was a major current, Adolf Brand and his Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, “Community of the Unique,” exemplified another approach. From 1896 to 1931, Brand was the publisher of Der Eigene, the first gay newspaper in the world and the first publication to revisit the thinking of the godfather of individualist anarchism, Max Stirner, half a century after the publication of his book The Unique and its Property.
\n\nThe Gemeinschaft was Brand’s attempt to forge what Stirner called a Union of Egoists. Brand’s union was a milieu of writers and a private readership numbering in the thousands. Over the decades, the anarchism of der Eigene became less pronounced as Brand shifted focus toward homoerotic art and culture. The newspaper published erotic photographs and poems, as well as treatises on pagan classicism, romanticism, friendship, and intimate comradeship. Its pages gave space to an ideologically idiosyncratic array of anarchists, nationalists, racists, and anti-racists, including proponents of the liberating potential of masculinity or androgyny. Besides complaining about the dwindling membership in the Gemeinschaft, a consequence of economic turmoil but also of defection to the Nazi Party, Brand largely avoided taking a stance on the Nazis until the controversy around Röhm compelled him to denounce the Party for its hypocritical stance on homosexuality and enforcement of Paragraph 175. While some from the Gemeinschaft joined the Third Reich and others resisted it, Brand retreated from politics and avoided repression, with the exception of a handful of police raids on his office.
\n\nHe died with his wife when their house was destroyed in an Allied bombing in 1945. Many in his milieu didn’t see a contradiction between homosexual interests and heterosexual marriage.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/08/19/7.jpg\")
Der Eigene, arguably the first gay newspaper.
\nThe Catastrophe forced every living person to make a choice. Brand, like countless others, chose the path of quiet submission. But this submission was not universal. The dominant historical narrative, which teaches us that obedience was total, threatens to bury the stories of those who fought back. As Benjamin wrote,
\n\n\n\n\nNot even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.
\n
Ian Young starts his account by discussing another homosexual thinker who was prominent before the catastrophe, the poet Stefan George. Today, George is scarcely remembered in the gay canon, but in his time, he was immensely popular. His contemporaries understood him as an authoritarian, an elitist, and a mystic. The reality was much weirder. Born to a winemaker of peasant stock, Stefan demonstrated a propensity for poetry from a very young age. At nine years old, he invented his own language, much richer than his native German, with which to write his poetry. In his twenties, he travelled throughout Europe studying language and translating Baudelaire. Between 1886 and 1899, he wrote his first book of poetry in yet another language he constructed in order to avoid writing in the vulgar German on offer. Though living in Berlin at the time, he rarely even spoke his native language. He almost exclusively socialized with a small scene of Mexican poets he had met abroad; his second new language resembled Spanish more than any other argot. He was never at home, save for in the words written in his own script.
\n\nIn his introduction to a book of George’s poems translated into both German and English, Stefan’s student Ernst Morwitz wrote,
\n\n\n\n\nGeorge was always proud of never having a permanent home, of not depending upon worldly possessions, and of leading a wandering life with only one aim: the search for men to share his views and his form of being.
\n
He wandered for decades through the city and countryside, among the working class and the estates of nobility, seeking talented young men to take on as students. Outsiders referred to the scene around him as the George Circle; by the late Weimar era, prestigious offices throughout the German Academy and publishing world were held by members of the circle. We don’t know much about the inner activity of the circle, but we know that they put a strong emphasis on beauty, mysticism, rigorous self-discipline, heroic vitalism, the Nietzschean transvaluation of prevailing values, and the aestheticism of the male body and homosexual idealism that were newly emerging with reference to Classical Greece. Though we know relatively little, many have inferred that much of the ritual performed by the group was devotional cultus to a youth known as Maximin who had died tragically. George imagined Maximin as a reincarnated Antinous—the beloved boyfriend of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, deified in the imperial religion after he mysteriously drowned in the Nile.
\n\nIn sharp contrast to the ambiguity of Brand and others—and surprisingly, considering his seemingly reactionary views—George was firmly opposed to the Nazis from the start. He dreamed of a new civilization, but one distinctly Greek rather than German. He supported the elitism of a spiritual and artistic aristocracy, but considered racial elitism vulgar. Though his poetry specifically prophesied the rise of a new Reich and popularized the term Führer long before Hitler’s rise, he was staunchly resolved that Hitler and his Party were absolutely not the ones. Half of the George Circle was Jewish, and Stefan purged anyone who expressed racist ideas or Nazi sympathies. He did not keep his criticism secret, either.
\n\nThis didn’t stop the Nazis from offering him a position as Poet Laureate of the Third Reich—or any other position he wanted—in 1933. They were convinced that his poetry would lend a seal of prophetic approval to their new order. Not only did George refuse, but he sent Morwitz, a Jew, to deliver his letter of refusal. Fearing a fate similar to that of Nietzsche—who was utilized posthumously by the Nazis—George fled to Switzerland with his closest supporters, vowing that he refused to be buried in German soil while Hitler was still in power. As Morwitz recounts,
\n\n\n\n\nIn December 1933, Stefan George died in voluntary exile in the Lago Maggiore. The Swiss sculptor Uehlinger made a cast of his hands and two death masks, which have not been released to the public. The Nazi government wished to take his body to his native land and to inter him with great solemnity in one of the famous medieval cathedrals, but this was refused by the friends who had been called to Locarno. They carried his body to a small chapel where the peasants gather for funerals, and without any publicity, buried him in the early morning. He lies in the Cemetery of Minusio. The grey slab of alpine granite bears only his name in the script he himself evolved and used for his works.
\n
Ian Young tells us that George’s disciples stood vigil so that Nazi grave robbers couldn’t disinter his corpse and return him to Germany. During their vigil, they swore an oath to avenge their master, who they understood had died prematurely as a consequence of the stress caused by exile.
\n\nWalter Benjamin wrote a great deal about George, both during George’s lifetime and after his death. In 1933, Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem, saying, “If ever God has smitten a prophet by fulfilling his prophesies, then this is the case with George.” The prophet had foreseen the wrath of God, the dark days that began in 1914 and had not yet reached their end. Following his death, the rising sun of the Nazi regime had “cast new lights and shadows ingrained into his deeply furrowed features. But we do not yet know the aura with which history will illuminate those features on the day they receive their expression in eternity.” For Benjamin, George and his circle, in their classicism, were engaged in a “canonical insurrection against time—a holy war against the century that George himself proclaimed,” but this classicism remained a late and statesmanlike discovery. Benjamin accuses George of having failed to produce any meaningful propositions to sweep away the order he saw dying. The disposition of the George circle was purely critical:
\n\n\n\n\nGeorge, whose foreknowledge of the catastrophe sprang from his strict discipline and innate sense of the powers of darkness, was, as leader and teacher, able to prescribe only feeble courses of action, remote from the realities of life. In his eyes, art was that seventh ring with which an order that was collapsing on all fronts was to be bound together one more time.
\n
The products of that seventh ring were enough to hold Benjamin’s attention, if not to gain his endorsement. In an earlier letter to Scholem, Benjamin reports, “My hands were flayed by the thorns of a rose bush in George’s garden that was in surprisingly beautiful, partial bloom.” That bloom was Max Kommerell, who had written a treatise on German classicism. Benjamin himself published a critical review of this work under the title “Against a Masterpiece.” In direct response to Komerell’s claim to be able to see in the heavens over their circle, “a sun, a dawn, and the eternal stars,” Benjamin replied:
\n\n\n\n\nIf images are timeless, theories certainly are not. It is not tradition but their vitality that determines their worth. The authentic image may be old, but the authentic idea is new. It is of today. Admittedly, this “today” may be paltry. But whatever form it takes, our task is to seize it by the horns so that we can interrogate the past. It is the bull whose blood must fill the grave if the spirits of the departed are to appear at its edge. It is this deadly thrust of ideas that is absent from the work of the George Circle. Instead of offering up sacrifices to the present, they avoid it. Every critique must contain some militant element; it, too, knows the daemon of battle.
\n
Benjamin saw many spirits among George and his Circle—satyrs, centaurs, genius and virtus, kairos, Pan, Fortuna, and Psyche, and other daemons—but it was specifically the spirit of battle that was missing, leaving the heroic ambitions of the circle mere fantasy. Their oath of vengeance was not yet known, and would not be fulfilled until after Benjamin died while fleeing the Nazis in 1940. Before his death, Benjamin wrote in one of his final letters to Theodor Adorno that Adorno’s recent book on George and George’s early student Hoffsmanthal was his greatest work. He cited a passage from Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah comparing the complicity among homosexuals to the complicity among Jewish people and described his old friend as coming to George’s rescue, having recognized defiance as the poetic and political foundation of his work.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/08/19/11.jpg\")
Walter Benjamin hitting the books.
\nAdorno dedicated the finished version of his book to Benjamin, whose suicide was still fresh when the ink was laid. What he had seized on in George was
\n\n\n\n\nThe passionate effort to express oneself in language, keeping banality at a distance, the attempt, however hopeless, to extricate experience from its mortal enemy, which engulfs it in late bourgeois society—oblivion. The banal is consecrated to oblivion; that which is given form is to endure as a secret historiography. […] No power on earth can resist transience that is not itself a transient power. Defiance of society includes a defiance of its language. […] As faithful pupils of Baudelaire, George and Hoffsmanthal established happiness where it was defamed. What is allowed withers and vanishes for him, the unnatural is charged with the task of recreating the multitude of visions that were distorted by the primacy of procreation, irresponsible play seeks to overcome the ruinous seriousness of whatever happens to be. Both shake personal identity to the roots with a silent roar, identity, the walls, of which comprise the innermost prison cell of the existing order.
\n
In the final words of his lengthy treatment, Adorno names what survives of the defiance of the George Circle as “determinate negation”—constitution through destruction.
\n\nWe will return to the remainder of this secret history shortly. First, we must consult the latter half of Daniel Guérin’s travelogue to set the stage for the events that were to elevate the George Circle and other homosexual guerillas to their place in eternity.
\n\nWhen Daniel Guérin returned to Germany in 1933, he was shocked by how radically the country had changed in just one year. Gone were the leftist parties and labor unions that had held so much power, along with the notion that repression would foment proletarian revolution. The parties had underestimated how rapidly and ruthlessly Hitler would destroy their infrastructure and assimilate the useful elements into his own apparatus. The Nazis transformed the former headquarters of their enemies into offices for the SS. They changed the lyrics of old communist songs such as “Brüder zur Sonne, zur Freiheit” (“Brother, toward the Sun, toward Freedom”):
\n\n\n\n\nBreak the yoke of the tyrants who so cruelly oppress you
\n
\nAnd brandish the blood-red flag
\nAbove the workers’ world
The red flag became the swastika flag and the workers’ world became the workers’ state. Buildings, songs, propaganda aesthetics, even May Day were gleichgeschaltet—brought into conformity with the new regime. Guérin writes of Nazi youth training in what had previously been a communist neighborhood:
\n\n\n\n\nWere it not for the brown uniforms, one could believe that these were the proud Red Front fighters, the former masters of the streets. In the windows and despite the swastikas, the flags, like yesterday, are the color of blood.
\n
Former comrades, too, were brought into conformity. Guérin “saw the uncommitted drift from one camp to another with disconcerting ease.” The seeds of these betrayals had already been germinating the previous year. Guérin recounts spending the night in a youth hostel at which fascists, communists, and uncommitted youths all shared space. At night, they would join in song together, even if at the end they competed to drown each other out in a cacophony of “Rotfront!” and “Heil Hitler!” and other competing slogans. Yet until that moment, all the voices rang out in unison:
\n\n\n\n\nAs we walk along side by side,
\n
\nAnd sing the ancient air,
\nWhich the forests echo back,
\nThen, we feel it has to happen:
\nWith us will come new times,
\nWith us will come new times.
One of the youths confessed to Guérin that below the thin veneer of ideology, they all wanted the same thing: Revolution, a new way of life.
\n\nNot all of the youth were waiting for the politicians to give them that life. In Weimar, Guérin had encountered a small clique of what were referred to as wild-frei (wild and free), vagabonds whom he describes as “a bizarre mixture of virility and effeminacy.” When he sought more information about this enchanting gang, a comrade encouraged him to contact Christine Fournier, a comradely sociologist who had studied them. She divulged what she could when they met at her office:
\n\n\n\n\nWild-clique—a wild gang, a band of adolescents, gone astray, asocials, a community of youths rejected by the larger community.
\n
They lived communally, Fournier explained, with a strong sense of camaraderie and criminal intimacy. They traveled seeking danger and adventure. They wandered
\n\n\n\n\nto escape the temptation of suicide. They create a fantasy world for themselves, a world that rests upon precepts that are completely different from those of accepted morality, a world given over to the most unbridled instinct, a world of hatred toward the society which has abandoned them.
\n
They cross-dressed like pirates, bearing crude tattoos and piercings. They took shelter in caves, forests, and abandoned buildings, furnishing their dwellings with only a single central and communal mattress—Stoszsofas—literally “fucking sofas.” Most shockingly, Fournier related, they practiced secret rites of initiation, sometimes in a deserted forest or along a scenic lake outside Berlin. Variants on these rites involved knife fights, submersion in water, fire, or depraved sex acts. To be initiated into some of the gangs, one had to be fucked by every member or to ejaculate on command.
\n\nFournier blushed and went to the restroom. Guérin opened her files and saw the photographic evidence: wild gangs assembled in their queer garb, performing their rites, displaying phallic talismans. When she returned, she told him:
\n\n\n\n\nThe initiation celebration always degenerates into a drunken binge, a mad orgy. What these youths have read, of course, may have played a certain role: perhaps they are imitating primitive rites. But I rather believe that is really a matter of a spontaneous return to barbarism. Civilization, after all, is but a very thin, recent, and fragile veneer.
\n
Her 1931 account “Ring Youth Gangs” is included in the English edition of Guérin’s book. In it, she tries to document “a ghost that can be neither grasped nor unmasked, the ghost of the wild gangs.” She calls them gemeinshafts-unguhige, a community of those incapable of living in community. Her social worker colleagues estimated that as many as 14,000 youths belonged to these gangs. She contrasted the wild-frei to the Wandervogel, arguing that whereas the latter
\n\n\n\n\naspired toward a better future, for which their adherents were willing to work, inversely, the gangs, whether deliberately or not, mainly thought about destroying what existed […] They never mastered the vital ability to adapt to social reality. In order to avoid depression and suicide, these gravely mistreated boys & girls create their own fantasy world as compensation for the deprived existence they are force to lead.
\n
Their contempt, she claimed, was evidenced by the names of the gangs themselves: Black Love, Red Oath, Fear not Death, Bloody Bones, Dirty Guys, Forest and Field Sleepers, Tortoises, Brandy Thrush, Black Flag, Forest Pirates, Northern Lights. There were many named after Native American tribes. They carried on criminal activities, including prostitution, out of homosexual bars like the Adonis. Their “bulls” were chosen on the basis of “a record of achievement and a diploma of success in diverse criminal activities and a proven mastery of the whole range of sexual activity.” Each bull had a queen, but all gangs had a beloved, available to all. The gangs provided comradeship, recognition, sexual experience, and adventure. They were the “army reserve of the underworld,” each wearing an edelweiss to identify.
\n\nFournier worried about these youth. As a pious reformer, she knew that only a proper socialist education could save them. Guérin was left with a different anxiety to keep him up at night: he knew that any force that could discipline them would be a terrifying one indeed. He too was cursed with prophecy. When he returned, Fournier told him that one day, a particularly vicious SA captain had called out to her in the streets. She was shocked to recognize that this Nazi was a former bull from one of the gangs she had studied.
\n\nDespite this, Guérin assures us:
\n\n\n\n\nNot all the wild-frei wound up in the service of the Nazis. On the contrary, groups of youth continued to “wander” and hide in the forests through Nazi rule, including the war years. Some of these groups actively harassed the Hitler Youth and engaged in other anti-government activities.
\n
Slim pamphlets have circulated in the anarchist underground in recent decades detailing some of the exploits of these gangs. In one such text, named for the common slogan “Eternal War on the Hitler Youth,” Wolfi Landstreicher celebrates the non-conformity and resistance of these
\n\n\n\n\nyouth largely from the exploited classes, attacking the domination under which they lived with audacity even when it took the form of a genocidal totalitarian police state of the most extreme form.
\n
Other accounts have been published on libcom.org and by the Anarchist Federation. All the sources agree that starting in 1938, the Nazi authorities (especially the Hitler Youth and Gestapo) were increasingly concerned with working-class gangs, which they referred to collectively as Edelweiss pirates. Their little revolts included absenteeism, graffiti, illegal leafleting, industrial sabotage, and physical violence against Nazi targets. Surprise attacks on Hitler Youth camping and hiking groups were carried out in the countryside and in the cities. These groups had no apparent ideology and only informal structures. Songs stolen by the Nazis were stolen in turn, adjusted once more to extol freedom and the joy of the attack. The pirates sheltered escapees and deserters and carried out armed raids on military depots. In 1944, they killed a Gestapo chief. By that year, Himmler himself had issued orders for the SS to combat the youth cliques. Some were captured and hanged, but countless more stayed free. After the war, many of the Edelweiss pirates continued their revolt against the new masters: the allied powers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/08/19/4.jpg\")
A collage by Claude Cahun.
\nThe anarchist pamphlets celebrate the resistance of the wild ones who continued to wander, but omit all mention of their queer rituals and form of life. These rites and hustles afforded them the freedom to be the destroyers and creators of their own cosmology. When Fournier tells us that they lived in their own world, she is not referring to the individual delusions of one wild-frei or another, she is speaking to the sensibilities and consensus reality that they shared—an Other Germany below and at war with the Third Reich.
\n\nAfter the Catastrophe, Guérin referred again and again to this Other Germany that existed in the resistance. He sought to take us on a journey to
\n\n\n\n\nsearch out our friends of the Other Germany—a small group of staunch militants who have put the fratricidal quarrels of the past behind them and who continue the struggle under conditions of illegality and terror. They will greet us with this simple sentence: we have remained true to what we were.
\n
Guérin tells us that “the international today is but a tiny flame against the worldwide onslaught. But it still burns, and that is already something, enough so that humankind does not despair […] despite all the determined efforts to extinguish it, that flame still burns, but in the shadows and in the silence.”
\n\nIn his memoires, he traces a sequence of little fires carried by militant individuals and tended in the hearths of safe houses. These little fires spread across the country, forming constellations. Guérin would ride his bike from rendezvous to rendezvous, carrying contraband handmade newsletters and ephemera between comrades.
\n\n\n\n\nDeprived of leaders or having only rare contact with them, these small groups have learned to fend for themselves, taking initiatives and improvising under conditions of illegality. For proletarians once pressed into activity like cogs in a machine, this has been a fruitful test of their sound common sense.
\n
Guérin doesn’t reveal too much. Likewise, he offers few conclusions. The ones he spells out can be summarized by saying that perhaps shared reverence for our martyrs could inspire solidarity and cohesion—that for a decade, the left had failed to give adequate attention to the fascist phenomenon—that all revolutionaries must purge their movements of nationalism or risk paving the way for National Socialism—and that the only way to defeat fascism is with a living example, “a flesh and blood ideal.” He ends his account in the cemetery where the dead of a past generation’s revolution are buried: “This is the only corner of Germany that still belongs to us. Wilted flowers.” He calls his testimony but a minute of a fugitive reality.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/08/19/2.jpg\")
A collage by Claude Cahun.
\nIan Young’s hagiography preserves several accounts of queer participation in that fugitive reality.
\n\nStarting in 1940, an aristocrat named Count Albrecht von Bernstorff set out to undermine the regime from the inside. For years, he maintained a reputation as an effete, a useless effeminate and socialite. This served to conceal the fact that he was using his social web to operate an underground railroad smuggling Jews and dissidents out of Germany.
\n\nEventually, he was caught and sent to the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. There, some witnesses report, he was treated horrendously and tortured by the guards, yet still endeavored to keep other prisoners’ spirits up. He promised to throw a big party at his estate for everyone when it was all over. He didn’t survive to host the party, but hundreds remained free because of his efforts.
\n\nCount Albrecht had warned his contacts in Holland about the Nazi invasion before it began. Afterwards, the Nazi leadership in Holland consistently reported the persistence of the homosexual weeds in their garden.
\n\nIn one instance, members of a gay society took measures ahead of the German invasion in preparation for the Catastrophe. The editor of their paper, Levensrecht, burned the entire mailing list of the organization. Another comrade, Arent van Santhorst, committed the entire list to memory.
\n\nWillem Arondaus and Sjoerd Baaker joined a very gay resistance group in Amsterdam, associated with Gerrit van der Veen. They carried out a number of attacks, including the dynamiting of a records office that destroyed Gestapo case files on thousands of suspected deviants. The group also forged 80,000 fake IDs for others. This tip gave many the headstart they needed to withstand catastrophe.
\n\nJean Desbordes was an old protégé of Jean Cocteau, who described being disturbed by his “starry gaze.” They spent a summer together traveling and visiting Gertrude Stein and Coco Chanel. At the time, Cocteau was writing Le livre blanc, while Desbordes wrote his pantheistic book, J’adore. His later works included a play and a study of the Marquis de Sade. After the Nazis invaded France, Desbordes joined the resistance, acting as a messenger between the French resistance and members of the Polish resistance who were operating out of London. In 1944, he was arrested in Paris by the pro-Nazi French militia and taken to a Gestapo torture center; another detainee reports having seen his corpse there in a blood-spattered bathroom, disfigured by violence. He kept silent unto death. None of his associates were arrested.
\n\nAnother resistance fighter, Robert Desnos, whom Ian Young describes as a “gay Surrealist poet,” wrote resistance poems and died in a concentration camp. Before his death, he comforted others by using astrology and palmistry to tell their fortunes. Susan Griffin recounts a story wherein he read the palm of a man waiting in line for the gas chamber. He ecstatically proclaimed long life for the man, leading to a wave of jubilation to spread through the line. The disruption was so bewildering that the guards sent everyone back to their beds.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/08/19/8.jpg\")
A portrait of Robert Desnos taken by Claude Cahun.
\nIn his poem, “If You Only Knew,” Desnos wrote,
\n\n\n\n\nIf you only knew how I love you and, though you do not love me, how happy I am, how strong and proud I am, with your image in my mind,
\n
\nto leave the universe.
\nHow happy I am to die for it.
A British secret agent named Denis Rake joined the French resistance. Asked about his many acts in the underground during an interview for the film The Sorrow and the Pity, Rake replied,
\n\n\n\n\n“I think deep down what I wanted to do was to be able to display the same kind of courage my friends who had become flyers had. Being a homosexual, one of my strongest fears was lacking the courage to do certain things.”
\n
Rake claimed that his previous career as a drag performer helped him as a secret agent. At one point, he had an affair with a German officer who was subsequently transferred to the front and killed.
\n\nMost spectacularly, in 1944, a disabled veteran of the German armed forces named Claus von Stauffenberg carried a suitcase with a bomb into a meeting at Hitler’s East Prussian office and hid it under a table. A network of conspirators was positioned to seize power once the Führer was dead. The bomb almost killed everyone in the room, including the Führer himself—it would have succeeded if someone had not moved it behind a marble pillar just before it exploded. Hitler was only slightly wounded, but in the aftermath, 12,000 suspected dissidents were rounded up on suspicion of conspiracy.
\n\nMany have heard the story of von Stauffenberg’s attentat, but few know of his background in the George Circle. Von Stauffenberg had been one of the twelve students who accompanied Stefan George to Switzerland and stood vigil over his grave.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/08/19/14.jpg\")
Stefan George and the von Stauffenberg brothers.
\nIan Young calls von Stauffenberg “a spirit of fire,” contending that he was driven by his spiritual background with Stefan George. He emphasizes the circle’s
\n\n\n\n\nheroic vitalism with its reverence for culture and the Greek tradition, its homoerotic mysticism, and its belief that the teaching could save the world if transformed into heroic action by the courage and integrity of the initiate.
\n
Von Stauffenberg inspired his comrades to conspiracy by reciting George’s poem “Antichrist”:
\n\n\n\n\nThe Lord of the Flies is expanding his Reich;
\n
\nAll treasures, all blessings are swelling his might…
\nDown, down with the handful who doubt him!
\nCheer louder, you dupes of the ambush of hell;
\nWhat’s left of life-essence, you squander its spells
\nAnd only on doomsday feel paupered.
\nYou’ll hang out your tongues, but the trough has been drained;
\nYou’ll panic like cattle whose farm is ablaze…
\nAnd dreadful the blast of the trumpet.
Von Stauffenberg named the conspiracy the Hidden or Secret Germany. Members of the George circle spent a decade infiltrating the Nazi Party and the German military to put themselves in proximity to Hitler in order to fulfill their heroic oath. With George gone, they were left to meet Benjamin’s challenge—to ensure that their dead would be safe from the enemy.
\n\nYoung argues:
\n\n\n\n\n“George’s concept of a semi-secret society, an aristocratic elite of initiates, in love with an idealized version of Attic Greece and employing the tenets of the Master’s crypto-religious Maximin cult in the modern world, must seem to our contemporary standards arrogant, naïve, and at least a little ridiculous. But Claus von Staufenberg’s life proves that, for all its theatricality, the Circle was not so ridiculous after all. For of all its members, Stauffenberg felt most deeply the significance of George’s ideas, and took them most seriously. And when the time came, he acted on them, and gave his life for them.”
\n
A simultaneous outbreak of subversion within the German military on the occupied island of Jersey can be attributed to a pair of queer surrealist stepsisters and lovers, Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe. Ryan Helterbrand’s “Plastic / Explosive: Claude Cahun and the Politics of Becoming Otherwise” offers the most extensive English-language treatment of Cahun’s background and resistance since scholars rediscovered her in the 1980s. While a good deal of attention has been paid to her art since the 1990s, Helterbrand looks to the revolutionary anti-fascist praxis of the “other Cahun.”
\n\nIn Paris, in 1935, Cahun joined Andre Breton and Georges Bataille in forming the group Contre-Attaque, “the combat union of revolutionary intellectuals,” to fight fascists through art and in the street. They wanted to form an organization that would operate outside Stalinist ideology and the structures of bureaucratic communism. Dissatisfied with the popular front, which would soon fail to prevent invasion while practically abandoning the revolution, they vowed to fight fascists and capitalism simultaneously. They wanted to break with all notions of community based on nation or ideology to make way for new communities grounded in elective affinities. In their time together, Breton described Cahun as “possessed of a very extensive magical power.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/08/19/10.jpg\")
Claude Cahun.
\nBy 1937, she was disillusioned with street fighting and moved to the island of Jersey, which the Nazis invaded in 1940. The initial Nazi bombing of the island was horrifying, killing many residents. Enraged, Cahun found a pair of revolvers given her by her uncle and began practicing her marksmanship. She prepared to carry out an attack on a gathering of Nazi officers, but Suzanne inspired her to take a different approach.
\n\nRather than die in a shootout, they formed an underground cell: “the Nameless Soldiers and their Comrades.” They published thousands of leaflets aimed at using Surrealism to foment revolt in the ranks of the occupying German soldiers. Their warfare was informed by Cahun’s time in Contra-Attaque and the theory of perpetual insurrection she had developed there. When the couple was arrested in 1944, prosecutors referred to them as “spiritual sharpshooters.” Cahun was found guilty of having waged spiritual warfare against the Nazis.
\n\nHelterbrand writes:
\n\n\n\n\nWhat was necessary for true insurrection was neither blind faith nor submission to a particular party or political form, but instead the presence and encouragement of psychic contradiction and complexities. Not ideological certainties, but psychological ambiguities. The true revolutionary embracing their aggressive drives, their own inner alterity, could instantiate a new consciousness.
\n
She believed in writing as a vehicle via which the writer and reader could both transform themselves in the encounter. She understood this transformation as reconfiguring the communal distribution of the sensible. Taking her cues from Bataille’s Acéphale society, she determined that
\n\n\n\n\nthe organization of the movement had to be formless, headless, no meetings, no leaders. And anyone who felt moved by a particular piece of propaganda could join the resistance simply by performing their own act of rebellion and signing it as nameless soldiers.
\n
This insurrection in sensibility aimed to destabilize the occupation by sowing confusion and paranoia within Nazi leadership and inspiring internal acts of sabotage. The nameless soldiers achieved this by exalting defeatism and encouraging introspection and internal revolt among the soldiers. She encouraged them to become otherwise.
\n\nHelterbrand proposes that we see
\n\n\n\n\nCahun’s anarchistic and resolutely individualist program of anti-Nazi resistance on Jersey […] as her own instantiation of a headless, acephalic community, one dedicated to rescuing from the trenches of ideology all those who had been “brainwashed” by the unilateral sensibilities and moralities of fascism, National Socialism, Communism, or capitalism.
\n
One of their earliest tracts reads
\n\n\n\n\nFIGHTINGFIGHTINGFIGHTING WITHOUT END
\n
\nHORRIFIC FIGHTING WITHOUT END
Other tracts simply repeat the phrase ohne Ende, without end. Theirs was a conspiracy without names or ends. Because they were not aiming for a revolution in the power-holders of the state, but rather “perpetual insurrection in the sensibilities of all,” they equipped themselves with new weapons charged with the contradiction, ambivalence, and uncertainly of the without. Weapons without name. Weapons aligned to produce inner and outer alterity. These nameless weapons included reports from the war, tips for psychic self-defense, instructions for casual sabotage, encouragements for desertion (“with violence if necessary”), and aphorisms from Nietzsche ridiculing nationalism and the state. They were composed in German in order to appear to be coming from the soldiers themselves, written on rolling papers and slipped into pockets and through fences around town.
\n\nClaude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe were prepared to be arrested at any moment, so when the day finally came, they swallowed poison en route to the prison. Their suicide attempt failed, but fortuitously delayed them long enough that they missed the last transport headed for the concentration camps. They remained imprisoned on Jersey, where they discovered why they were considered such a threat by their enemies. The prison was filled with German soldiers who had revolted or attempted to desert. They all seemed to be aware of who the women were and showed them care and solidarity. The theory of writing as a means to engage others in a process of becoming had proved itself: Cahun’s and Malherbe’s efforts had succeeded in attuning at least some of the soldiers to the Hidden Germany beneath all the Nazi spectacle.
\n\nThe courts sentenced them to death. Their executions were to be the ultimate act in their spiritual war, a sacrifice they were prepared to make—but that never came to pass. The war ended before they too became martyrs of the underworld. On the day the Nazis on the island surrendered, they were the very last prisoners to be released, considered the most dangerous.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/08/19/9.jpg\")
Claude Cahun.
\n\n\n\nI lived in those times. For a thousand years
\n\n
\nI have been dead. Not fallen, but hunted;
\nWhen all human decency was imprisoned,
\nI was free among the masked slaves.-Robert Desnos, “Epitaph”
\n
\n\n\n“Stauffenberg, von Bernstorff, Arondaus, Bakker, Desbordes, Desnos, Rake… diverse kinds of people, but all brought together in spirit by a cruel time that demanded heroic action from those who could find the courage within themselves. At least in the cases of Jean Desbordes, the two Dutchmen and the two Germans, their work in the resistance seems intimately linked to an idealism rooted in homosexuality or homosexual ideology. For Rake, an effort to prove himself as brave as the ‘normal’ man resulted in his proving himself braver than anyone could have expected or hoped.
\n\nThere is something of a common pattern here; the precocious writer of erotic poetry; the amusing drag queen. The kind of people Americans call ‘sissies.’ Beneath the pallid and perhaps limp-wristed exteriors, often lies a character of great strength—strong enough to survive adversity and to flourish. Strong enough, even, to survive the rigors and neglect of what is called History.”
\n\n-Ian Young
\n
We need hardly say more. This has been a long time coming and these stories and spirits will take time to assert themselves in the present. For now, we can conclude with a few gestures toward further lines of inquiry.
\n\nThe Wild-Frei constituted their own underworld. The George Circle conspired in the name of a secret Germany, while Guérin and Cahun devoted their efforts to communicating that Germany’s existence. This space of alterity was created through an insurrection against time in the realm of the sensible; it was built with poetry, ritual, sexuality, and gunpowder. All the ancestors we have invoked here were empowered by and through the ways that their resistance formed a world—secret, hidden, other—in defiance of the world in which the Nazis sought total power.
\n\nThis project of totality existed in unbroken continuity with the terror inflicted by the forces that constructed Whiteness throughout the world, a terror that returned the apparatuses and techniques of extraction and extermination to the European soil from which they first set sail. This is why there is no “before” or “after” the Catastrophe. As Benjamin puts it, where we see a chain of events, the Angel of History sees a single pile of wreckage mounting toward the sky. The perceived moment of catastrophe was simply an apocalypse in the most ancient sense of the word: an unveiling of what already was, of who we already were.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/08/19/13.jpg\")
“This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” -Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History.
\nGuérin’s message from the underground—we’ve remained what we were—applies to the Nazis as well. The terror of fascism is woven into the very fabric of the norm. The Nazis foresaw a thousand-year Reich, envisioning themselves eternal. They are, but not because of the future they promised. Rather, they are the inheritors of millennia of development in the techniques of domination and order. Hocquenghem was prophetic in 1980 to insist that the Gay Liberation of the time was neither unprecedented nor irreversible; we’d be wise to remember his warning today. All states are formed through the sacrifice of the Other. “Faggot” shares a signifier with fasces, a bundle of sticks burned for the coherence of the community. We have been that Other many times—but we will not go easily again. We can’t afford to make the same mistakes once more.
\n\nOur enemies are fighting for eternity and so are we. The Wild-Frei declared “Eternal War,” and Cahun called it “Perpetual Insurrection.” Our ghosts restore for us the potential of a revolt without end. The right- and left-wing revolutionaries of the preceding century were animated by a masculinist idea of virility, attempting to repeat the mythical final act of the crucified by vanquishing death itself. The fantasy of the triumph of life over death has already born its rotten fruit. In death, we can access an eternity still denied to the transhumanists of our time. Among the dead, we find our greatest co-conspirators. The fact that their worlds have such purchase on the present leaves us the task of redeeming their efforts. Edvard Munch elaborated a vitalism intertwined with death when he wrote, “From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.”
\n\nIn the rapid escalation of armed attacks by spree shooters, today’s Nazis reclaim their capacity for sacrifice. Our only hope is, in turn, to sacrifice that sacrificial impulse of fascism in the name of non-fascist life, anarchy. Determinate negation: to be bound together through our proximity to death, our personal relationships to our shared dead establishing the ground for a world held in common. In this project, we cannot limit our critique of fascism, neither for ideological nor social comfort. Our hostility to the terror of the norm must be expansive, it must cut to the very core of our being.
\n\nThe history traced above illustrates how the parties and their leaders have failed to turn back the tide of catastrophe. It is no wonder that Guérin turned to anarchism after living through this mess. Remember, it was the bull who turned Gestapo; George had to die for his circle to blossom; Claude and Suzanne were ready for martyrdom but survived all the same. Ryan Helterbrand proposed the Nameless Soldiers as a mirror of the Acéphale society, which spent the years after Contra-Attack preparing for the Catastrophe through bacchic worship of a headless figure. Reputedly, they desired to sacrifice one of their own. They disbanded because each wanted to be the sacrifice, but none to hold the knife. Cahun succeeded where Acéphale failed: she sacrificed herself and her enemies by choosing the initiating ego death of metamorphosis. Initiation, ego death, opens the door to the immanence of another reality through newfound sensibilities. The Fool’s journey ends by accessing the World. We must be willing to lose our own heads.
\n\nHitler lost his head, too. And despite the decades-long antifascist exhortation for neo-Nazis to follow their leader, their world persists. It went underground following the death of the Führer, that figure invested with so much psychic and political power. It is beyond the scope of this inquiry to trace the survival of Nazism, but the apoliteic proposals of Julius Evola—to preserve the world of fascist sensibility through art and mysticism—have surely played a key role. Fascism, too, is an underworld vying for hegemony in the apocalypse of Liberal Democracy. Now, as then, there is a drifting between worlds. Fascists have appropriated the position of outsider and the promise of fraternity in order to swell their ranks with disaffected young men. Now, as then, queers like Milo or the pick-me faggots of X make the mistake of ambiguity in light of catastrophe.
\n\nMore troubling are those comrades brought into conformity, either with Nazi militias or with the delusion of “Saving Democracy,” or, worse, the West. We wish there were simple answers to the dilemma of friends turning into enemies while others remain steadfastly what they were. Would that we could reduce it to a matter of strength of will or anti-racist commitments. But eternity demands our discernment. All we can do is honor our friends among the dead, and let their memory nourish the lifeways—queer, anarchic, other—they lived and died for.
\n\nBefore joining the ranks of the blessed dead, another Willem, wrote:
\n\n\n\n\nMy trans comrades have transformed me, solidifying my conviction that we will be guided to a dreamed-of future by those most marginalized among us today. I have dreamed it so clearly that I have no regret for not seeing how it turns out. Thank you for bringing me so far along.
\n
In the years since then, we’ve seen an international trans panic surrounding the all too predicable figure of the Child, this time the trans child. We warned over a decade ago that the Child was the black hole of all queer politics. With no viable political response, this seemingly inevitable and uninterrupted path toward catastrophe demands we imagine ways out, sidestepping the dead ends and honeypots of representation and identity. We need methods that anticipate the coming dilemmas. If we consolidate these lifeways, we might imagine another map. Invoking these stories, we pray for the ludic efficacy of their underground forms: the George circle came closest to killing Hitler, the wild boys continued their war when all else acquiesced, and two lesbian poets calling themselves nameless soldiers inspired mass insubordination among the enemy ranks.
\n\nIdris saw in Michael Reinoehl the spirit of John Brown reborn.2 In writing his letter to the former, he calls to presence the eternal war they both waged. Let’s append a few more names to the unending litany of the fallen in that war. What transmigrations of the soul are demanded now?
\n\nI place these names, images and sacred texts upon an altar. At the center, a mirror in which we ourselves are revealed. Before the mirror, a candle for the tiny eternal flame of the international underground. It is a black flame, burning from the sun in the underworld. Before the candle, a knife. I offer the waters of memory and the flowers that, by nature of their secret heliotropism, turn toward the sun.
\n\nDown with the Party form!
\nLong live the revolt of the liminal!
\nThe dead walk among us!
Şehîd namirin!
\nBella ciao!
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/08/19/5.jpg\")
“The Anarchist” by Sascha Schneider, a gay artist who contributed to Brand’s Der Eigene. The illustration at the top of this article is also by Schneider.
\nFor us, there is no distinction between the categories of “scholar” and “mystic.” We access the moments that precede us through the hermitic moment of study—an ecstatic discipline that, when turned toward history, opens up a vision of the apocalypse. Apocalypsis, unveiling, is possible in ecstasy, as well—ekstasis, when we stand outside ourselves. ↩
\n“What I mean is that there will be those who will continue to bear false witness, even though it is impossible to deny that it was none other than Ol’ Brown who manifested himself through you. It is obvious to anyone who was courageous enough not to turn away that the piercing stare that the two of you share in common is, in fact, one and the same. Indeed, it showed itself to us, as you sat in that wooded grove, where the unmistakable fire in your eyes made the same silent pledge that was also proclaimed in the black-and-white image of the great 19th-century abolitionist with his palm raised. It is the look of a person, man or woman, who has declared an eternal war against slavery.” ↩
\nSeven years ago, anarchists and other anti-fascists converged in Charlottesville, Virginia to oppose the “Unite the Right” rally. The organizers of the rally intended to bring together Klansmen, neo-Nazis, far-right militias, and fascists from the so-called “alt-right” to build a unified white supremacist street movement.
\n\nFascists had already been building momentum in the streets for a year. The rally was poised to establish them as a legitimate pole in United States politics. If that succeeded, millions of Donald Trump’s supporters might join them. All that the organizers of “Unite the Right” had to do was get through the weekend without incident.
\n\nA few hundred brave people set out to stop them. The anti-fascists were outnumbered, underprepared, and terrified.
\n\nIt’s important to remember this today—first, because the Trump era is not over. As exhausting and demoralizing as it is, we still face the same threats and challenges we confronted seven years ago, and the outcome remains as uncertain today as it was then. Revisiting the events in Charlottesville illuminates the stakes of our current struggles—when fascists are less active in the streets, but are seeking to take control of the entire country through the apparatus of the state. At the same time, the outcome of the events in Charlottesville shows how much a small number of courageous people can accomplish by putting their lives on the line when it counts, even when victory seems impossible.
\n\nWe present here a review of the events, drawing on the recollections of some of those who were on the front lines.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/08/10/1.jpg\")
Anti-fascists in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017.
\nThe 2016 Trump campaign had emboldened fascists of all stripes. Coming out of Trump’s electoral victory, many fascists adopted a strategy in which they targeted locations they considered to be liberal hotspots, such as Berkeley, California and Portland, Oregon.1 In some ways, this approach was savvy: in a polarizing political context, in which hatred of the other was among the chief motivations of their potential supporters, it enabled them to seek recruits by provoking and caricaturing their opposition.
\n\nAt first, the strategy bore fruit for them. On April 15, 2017, fascists rampaged through Berkeley, recording video footage of themselves beating people to use for recruiting purposes. In retrospect, we can identify that day as the high point of their campaign targeting the Bay Area.
\n\nCharlottesville is a liberal college town in Virginia. Pursuing the same strategy his colleagues had employed in Berkeley, the suit-and-tie fascist Richard Spencer led a torch-lit rally in Charlottesville on May 13, 2017 protesting the proposed removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Seeking to forge ties between various brands of Nazis and white nationalists, Spencer’s supporters organized another rally for August 12.
\n\nOn the night of August 11, hundreds of fascists who had arrived early participated in a surprise torch-lit march through the streets of Charlottesville. At the conclusion of the march, they attacked a small number of counterdemonstrators at the foot of the statue of Thomas Jefferson while the authorities looked on passively.
\n\nWatching footage of the march and the attacks with which it concluded, many people around the United States suddenly understood the threat. The situation was even more frightening for people in Charlottesville itself.
\n\nI am one of the people who went to Charlottesville to shut down the “Unite the Right” rally.
\n\nOn the night of the 11th, many of us went to UVA [University of Virginia at Charlottesville] campus to see if there was something we could do and independently arrived at the conclusion that it was not the night to engage with those fuckers in the way that they deserved. We decided that we just had to take the loss for twelve hours and pin our hopes on the next day. Later that night, there were arguments, accusations of cowardice, recriminations, second-guessing. Personally, I felt that all that would have happened would have been that we would have gotten completely fucked up and possibly worse, making it even less likely that there would be enough people on hand for the day of the rally itself.
\n\nI remember somebody saying that some UVA employee in a uniform told them, “You all should get out of here. If they go after you, we’re not going to be able to do anything about it.” That was a classic cowardly law-enforcement thing to say. At the same time, it was not factually untrue.
\n\nOn the other hand, the night of the 11th, someone I didn’t know at a meeting I participated in said that his best advice for the next day was to “Fake it till you make it.”
\n\nThat was basically what we did.
\n\nI did not sleep on the night of August 11, 2017. I was certain that some of us were going to die the next day.
\n\nMy friends and I had traveled to Charlottesville in order to put a stop to the “Unite the Right” gathering. We had just returned from the campus of the University of Virginia, and based on what we had seen, I felt that there was no chance that the next day was going to end without bloodshed.
\n\nOn that night, if a necromancer had presented me with the following prophecy, I am sad to say that I would have accepted it with relief:
\n\n“One of you will die tomorrow, but your opponents will leave town in disarray. Public opinion will turn sharply against them both locally and nationally. They will cannibalize each other and this event will be remembered as the nadir of the Trump administration. In three years’ time, young people will topple the government that these murderers serve.”
\n\nThe truth is, I was certain that we were in for something much worse than that. I lay awake until dawn, running through scenarios in my mind. Then I got up and prepared to go confront the fascists.
\n\nLooking back afterwards, one anarchist who was in Charlottesville recounted,
\n\n\n\n\nFriday night seriously shook people, but it probably made us more determined and smarter on Saturday. I almost want to say wiser. We knew exactly what kind of victory we needed to deny them, and we knew we would have to do it without the advantage of physical superiority.
\n
On August 12, angry locals, religious leaders, and other opponents of fascism squared off against the fascists amassing in downtown Charlottesville. Police looked on, permitting intense confrontations to take place between the two groups without doing anything. Anti-fascists found themselves in a volatile and perilous situation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/08/10/3.jpg\")
State troopers guarding the fence around the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017.
\nI had no interest in dealing with an out-of-state gun charge or getting into a situation in which I might be tussling with police with a gun in my pants. Those are two things I prefer to avoid under any circumstances. For that reason, I left my gun in my vehicle on the morning of the 12th. But later that morning, as it became inescapably clear what sort of situation we were dealing with, I went back and got it. At that point, I was less concerned about an out-of-state gun charge than I was about being unprepared for something worse.
\n\nNever before or since have I been involved in a day so fucked up that I sincerely felt that the least-bad option was to be messing around with a gun in a chaotic situation involving United States police officers. Not only did it feel certain that some of us were going to die, I also feared that it was entirely possible that one of us might have no choice other than to employ lethal force.
\n\nThere were quite a few anti-fascists with guns that day, not all of them open-carrying. One of the under-reported aspects of the day was that a large number of anti-fascists exhibited a fair degree of restraint and decent situational awareness in regards to gun safety. Many of us will always regret not managing to be in the right place at the right time to stop the fascist who killed Heather Heyer, but it’s easier to perpetrate a mass casualty incident than it is to prevent one. Despite the considerable stress and uncertainty of the situation, no one on our side has anything to regret in that department.
\n\nBy contrast, there was one neo-Confederate guy who fired his gun in the immediate vicinity of the crowd. That did not speak highly of his judgment. If we did not kill anyone, it was because we decided not to, despite having been directly provoked.
\n\nUltimately, the street confrontations forced public officials to rescind the permit for the “Unite the Right” rally, and the same police officers that the fascists had been courting were forced to drive them out of the park in which they were gathered. This aroused consideration agitation and dismay among the participants in the rally, who had hoped to hold an orderly event while projecting an image of strength.
\n\nIn a subsequent interview, one anarchist who fought in Charlottesville argued that the rally was defeated by the diversity of tactics that anti-fascists employed and by the contradictory goals of the participants:
\n\n\n\n\nUnite the Right was all about image. They wanted three things: to look like victims of antifa/”SJW” aggression, look like friends of the police, and look like they were winning the physical battle in the streets. I think all those wires got crossed in Charlottesville because of the diversity of their opposition…
\n\nA lot of these alt-right people are scared of confrontation, even though they fantasize about power. You could tell that made it hard for them to psychologically switch gears; by the time they figured out how to deal with one kind of counter-protestor, the situation had changed and they had to go back to square one. They had to think too hard. They didn’t know if they were going to get punched or prayed at. And the whole time, they’re getting pelted with paint balloons, and they just look silly.
\n\nThen you had macho types who reacted to that paralysis by just going ham, charging in swinging by themselves. That was scary, because these were big dudes who understood violence, but it didn’t really serve their larger goals, and they lost fights because we would surround them and beat them back. It didn’t help those guys that their official rally was up a hill behind barricades.
\n\nFinally, there were the guys in full-on riot gear, plexiglass shields and clubs and face-shields, stuff like that. They had a hard time early in the day, marching into the park, because they couldn’t figure out what kind of confrontation they were in; they wanted to beat us up but they wanted it to look like our fault, and they came out worse on both counts. Later, they regrouped, and it seemed like they were ready to crack some skulls in a more paramilitary style—charge out of the park in formation and just trample whoever was in their way. I think that would have happened more if the rally had gone on longer, because they were starting to give up on the whole image thing. We should have had more tools to obscure their vision and keep them at a distance. But the cops dispersed the rally before it went there. I think we can take some credit for that.
\n\nThis sounds weird, but I think anarchists might have better discipline than Nazis, at least in this kind of situation. Fascists had the advantage when things were really scripted, and a lot of them would have had the advantage in a one-on-one fight, but they were just clumsy when it came to navigating a complex situation. I guess I mean self-discipline. But it has this real communal aspect to it, because we actually care about each other and pay attention to each other, like not just our cliques and affinity groups, but also strangers. You can’t fake that. You can’t squeeze that out of an authoritarian ideology.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/08/10/4.jpg\")
Anti-fascists tore down the fences protecting the “Unite the Right” rally, ultimately compelling officials to cancel the permit for the event.
\nThe urgency of the situation drove many people to take risks that they would not ordinarily have taken.
\n\nThe standard liberal narratives—”Don’t feed a cycle of violence” and “Leave the police to handle public safety”—strike me as particularly out of touch with reality in relation to what happened in Charlottesville. First, the police told us on Friday night that when push came to shove, they were not going to be protecting anyone if doing so actually meant putting themselves in harm’s way. We’ve seen the same thing in Uvalde since then. Second, it seemed very clear to me that if the fascists got away with doing this in Charlottesville, they would be doing the very same thing in my own town soon thereafter. I felt like, Well, I guess it’s better that we do this now in Virginia, or we’re just going to be even more screwed when we have to do it at home a month from now.
\n\nFrom my perspective, throughout the weekend, everyone who took on the rally sort of shared a sense that we had not voluntarily picked that fight. It wasn’t easy to tell either by appearance or by people’s actions who was from Charlottesville and who was from somewhere else.
\n\nBullies and sadists frequently get themselves into trouble by underestimating their opponent and overestimating their own strength, whereas people who—for whatever reason—become psychologically accustomed to being bullied or dominated can get themselves into trouble by overestimating their opponent and underestimating themselves. In Charlottesville, the fascists took us lightly, and it didn’t work out for them.
\n\nIn a subsequent retrospective, participants in the events in Charlottesville argued that the police only took action after it became clear that the fascists could not win on their own:
\n\n\n\n\nDuring the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, the police largely stood back and let the confrontations play out. They only interceded to declare an unlawful assembly and clear the park when anti-fascists forced their hand, after the city and state authorities had announced a State of Emergency. This is consistent with a pattern that goes back at least a century. When white supremacists have the upper hand, police tend to give them free rein; when anti-fascists gain the advantage, police step in aggressively.
\n\nAfter Unite the Right, Charlottesville police faced a great deal of criticism for their hands-off handling of the demonstration. The response of police departments around the United States has been to shift to a more aggressive strategy involving massive multi-agency mobilizations and preemptive crackdowns.
\n
Had the police been sufficiently prepared for the situation in Charlottesville, the rally would have gone through as planned—and as a consequence, a great deal more violence might ultimately have taken place.
\n\nA tragedy took place in Charlottesville that day, nonetheless. That afternoon, as angry neo-Nazis and Klansmen fanned out from the park, James Alex Fields, a participant in the fascist mobilization, drove a car into a crowd of people, killing Heather Heyer and grievously injuring nineteen other people.
\n\nNothing could make up for the loss of Heather’s life. Many more people could easily have died in that attack; as it is, its consequences linger in the lives of hundreds of people. We honor Heather’s courage and the courage of all the others who knowingly put themselves in harm’s way that day for the sake of protecting others.
\n\nIn 2024, the place where Heather Heyer lost her life remains a place of memory, mourning, and calls to resist.
\nIn response to the rally and the attack, people immediately organized solidarity actions around the world. At least twenty took place on August 12, and well over sixty the following day. These brought a new energy to the movement against fascism.
\n\nFor example, anarchists in Chapel Hill, North Carolina organized a report-back from participants in the events in Charlottesville at the Confederate monument in the center of downtown. The next day, activists in the neighboring city of Durham pulled down the Confederate monument there, then faced down a threatened response from the Ku Klux Klan. A year later, people tore down the monument in Chapel Hill, setting a template for the wave of statue topplings throughout the country in 2020.
\n\nMeanwhile, corporate media outlets were caught flat-footed by the tragedy in Charlottesville. Their previous narratives about clashes between “extremists” had not prepared their audiences for the murder of Heather Heyer. For a few days, while corporate editors scrambled to reformulate their narratives, journalists had their hands free to simply tell the truth about what had happened in Charlottesville—and this drove some people to participate in their first anti-fascist mobilizations. These events brought Trump’s approval rating to its lowest point in the first years of his presidency, compelling him to fire his white nationalist advisor, Steve Bannon.
\n\nOn Saturday, August 19, many thousands of people converged in Boston to respond to a fascist rally. A week later, on Sunday, August 27, thousands of people converged in Berkeley to make a planned fascist demonstration impossible.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/01/03/12.jpg\")
Anarchists mobilize in a black bloc to prevent fascists from recruiting or murdering people in Berkeley on August 27, 2017.
\nJoseph Biden announced his 2020 presidential campaign with a video about the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. This underscores the importance of that day’s events in United States history. But neither Biden nor his supporters were there. The people who made the difference that day were not politicians or centrist Democrats—they were ordinary locals, many of them poor people of color, and partisans of liberation.
\n\nI already faced several felony charges from an anti-fascist march—but that was against Trump, not street Nazis. I wanted to play it cool in Charlottesville and help out however I could without making my legal situation significantly worse. I handed out earplugs to my friends as I watched them march towards the Lee monument. I felt certain that at least one of them was going to die.
\n\nLater, I helped report on police movements—which turned out to be useless, as the police were hands off that day. There were fascists in the park, anti-fascists in the street, and police in the parking lot. In other words, anti-fascists sandwiched between uniformed thugs on either side.
\n\nI helped take down the license plates of the cars that the Nazis were driving, in hopes of identifying them. I also spent some time outside the jail, in case any anti-fascists were arrested.
\n\nAfter the car attack, I moved to a local church that had opened its doors as a safe space for anti-fascists. Courageous teens from the youth group ran security outside it to make sure no far-right infiltrators made it into the sanctuary.
\n\nInside, I saw one masked-up anti-fascist lower her face covering. It was one of my codefendants. I had been mass-arrested, so I had quite a few codefendants, but this was someone from my trial group. At first, I panicked: “If anything happens to you,” I thought, “it could jeopardize our case.” But that thought didn’t make it all the way to my lips before my heart swelled for my comrade.
\n\nEarplugs, notes, radio communication about police movement. That’s not nothing, but—I wish I had fought. Not for the glory. Not to have a good story. There are just moments when it’s time to fight with everything you have before it’s too late.
\n\nIf we compare their activity under the Trump administration to what they have done under Biden, it is clear that, whatever their pretensions to being “anti-government,” none of these fascists and militia members are particularly motivated when it comes to taking on the state. They are much more interested in serving as the street-level supporters of an authoritarian government. We cannot understand the threat that they pose apart from the threat that state power itself represents.
\n\nAs we argued in August 2017,
\n\n\n\n\nUltimately, a thoroughgoing anti-fascist movement should not focus on targeting fascist groups that are so marginal that they stick out from the rest of the political spectrum, but take on the infrastructure through which any authoritarian program will be enacted. That is to say, it should focus on the state itself. If we simply fight defensive battles, the fascists will eventually gain the initiative. We should take the experiences of fighting together that we can experience in anti-fascist struggle and use those as points of departure to work together to solve all of the problems that we have.
\n
This applies regardless of whoever is in the White House come January 2025. While Trump promises to deport millions of people—a threat we should take seriously and prepare to confront—we must not forget that, thus far, both the Obama and Biden administrations have deported many more people than the Trump administration did. Rather than letting Trump and his foot soldiers terrorize us into the arms of centrist politicians while they slowly ratchet political discourse further and further to the right, we have to continue to move towards a horizon of real liberation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/08/10/2.jpg\")
Fascists are not the only force standing between us and our freedom.
\nDonald Trump himself adopted this strategy in summer of 2020, when he sent troops from the Department of Homeland Security to attempt to subdue demonstrators in Portland, Oregon. Like the Nazis he was imitating, he, too, ultimately failed. ↩
\nAleksei Sutuga grew up deep in Siberia, in Irkutsk—the city to which Mikhail Bakunin was once exiled, not to mention many other Russian rebels. Known to his friends as Socrates, Aleksei became involved in the Russian anarchist and anti-fascist movements. He is the subject of a new book, Socrates the Skinhead: The Life of a Russian Anti-Fascist.
\n\nIn tracing the story of his life, this book documents a vanished era of Russian history. Comprised of dozens of interviews with participants in the anarchist and anti-fascist movements across the first two decades of the twenty-first century, it offers one of the most detailed pictures of those struggles yet available in English. It is important for us to learn about that period today, because it was a time when history was still up for grabs—when the horrific tragedies that have since played out in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine were not yet inevitable.
\n\nThe interviewees recount how anarchism reemerged in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Sharing their memories of Socrates, they explore the relationship between hardcore punk, straight edge, veganism, anarchism, anti-fascism, and a variety of other forms of activism. They describe how Socrates and his comrades became locked in a brutal conflict—first with neo-Nazis, then with the Russian authorities. As a consequence, he spent years in Russian prisons.
\n\nSocrates was not just a fighter. He sang in hardcore bands, organized with Autonomous Action, and contributed to a range of other cultural activities. He also participated in theater, performing in plays such as Tvoi kalendar’/Pytki, which was based on monologues by participants in the Network case—a court case in which the Russian police used torture to force arrestees to sign false confessions in order to frame them as part of a fabricated terrorist conspiracy.
\n\nAleksei Sutuga passed away on September 1, 2020 in a tragic accident that occurred as a result of his choosing, once again, to stand up for others.
\n\nAt the invitation of our Russian comrades, we have provided an introduction to the book, exploring why Aleksei Sutuga’s story should be of interest outside Russia. The text appears below.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/24/2.jpg\")
A protest in Irkutsk in 2005. Fourth from the right is Aleksei Sutuga, known as Socrates.
\nIn Russia, the first decade of the 21st century was a time of possibility and danger.
\n\nPossibility. Because after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it became possible to propose new ideas and carry out new experiments. There were new problems—and new horizons, too. For young people, subculture served as a laboratory for new ways of living: punk, hardcore, veganism, straight edge, anarchism. The first\ngeneration of anarchists to find each other after the end of the Soviet Union had to rediscover how to articulate their dream of a better world. The second generation picked up where the first had left off, creating organizations, articulating ambitions, acting together to see if they could make that world a reality. Aleksei\nSutuga was part of this second generation.
\n\nAnd danger. Because the anarchists were not the only ones with a vision to propose. At the same time, neo-Nazis and other nationalists were taking advantage of the bedlam and anomie in Russia to carry out attacks and spread their noxious ideology. Aleksei and a few other brave individuals set out to stop them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/24/3.jpg\")
Socrates appearing via video link from Butyrka prison at a hearing, 2012.
\nIn fighting the far right while it was still a ragged street movement, they sought to prevent it from becoming the next ruling order. For a short time, Aleksei and\nhis comrades succeeded. They won control of the streets from the fascists, only to lose it to the state. Having used the far right as shock troops and appropriated its ideology, the government of Vladimir Putin set about crushing both fascists and antifascists, suppressing the sense of possibility that had prevailed in Russia.
\n\nWe followed all this distantly from the United States. While we were organizing Food Not Bombs and Really Really Free Markets, our Russian counterparts were fighting fascists in concert venues and train carriages. While we were vandalizing army recruiting offices, they were mourning comrades murdered by neo-Nazis. After we gathered in parks and plazas for Occupy Wall Street, they assembled in Bolotnaya Square in 2011 in a desperate bid to keep Putin from cementing control. By the time we were participating in the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore, many Russian anarchists had already been killed or forced into exile, and Aleksei was in prison.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/24/5.jpg\")
Socrates in 2017, after his release from the penal colony in Angarsk.
\nAnd then, in the United States, we were the ones mourning comrades murdered by neo-Nazis and scrambling to thwart an aspiring despot. The Russian context that had seemed distant to us was not so far away after all.
\n\nSo this is not simply a story about the Wild Wild East, a faraway exotic land. The same geopolitical forces and processes at work in Russia are also at work where we live, and we exoticize them at our peril. Like Aleksei and those who remember him, we too face a fascist movement driven by rising inequality and desperation, we too confront rising authoritarianism. We should understand the conditions in Russia and our own conditions as different facets of the same thing.
\n\nThis is especially pressing because this story is not over yet—neither in Russia, nor the United States.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/24/1.jpg\")
Police harass protesters supporting the defendants in the Network case after they were sentenced to between six and eighteen years in a penal colony apiece. February 2, 2020.
\nLooking at Russia in 2024, we can see that state violence does not come to an end once a single autocrat succeeds in consolidating power. On the contrary, once internal dissent has been crushed, the ruling class looks around for other enemies, other frontiers for conquest. Authoritarianism is not a static order, but a volatile system. It is a fire that must consume more and more fuel to persist. When authoritarians secure control over a society, war is the inevitable next step.
\n\nToday, we are living in the future that Aleksei and his comrades tried to stave off. As difficult as their times were, what has come since has been worse. We fight\nagainst fascism and totalitarianism because we know that every time we lose a battle against them, we will have to fight it again, only on worse terms, under even worse conditions.
\n\nThis book is a valuable work of historical memory, a gesture of defiance against death and autocracy. Over the course of a century and a half, there have only been a few years during which anarchists could organize openly in Russia. Some people still remember Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, the Makhnovschina, the Kronstadt uprising, the battle for Khimki forest—but who knows how many courageous people like Aleksei have been forcibly erased from the historical record? Remembering his life and learning from the situation he confronted is a way to resist totalitarianism. It is also a way to learn more about ourselves and how we might act today.
\n\nFor we, too, confront a time of possibility and danger.
\n\nYou can order the book here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/04/24/4.jpg\")
\n\n\n\nOlga Sutuga: I’ve known about, and indeed shared, my son’s political inclinations for a long time. I can’t say that I’m any kind of anarchist, I’m only starting to read Mikhail Bakunin and Nestor Makhno. But I do observe the principles of anarchism.
\n
\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2024/03/06/germany-in-the-streets-against-fascism-again-an-interview", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2024/03/06/germany-in-the-streets-against-fascism-again-an-interview", "title": "Germany: In the Streets against Fascism, Again : An Interview", "summary": "Anti-fascists explore the recent rise of fascist politics in Germany and the potential of the current street mobilizations against it.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/06/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/06/header.jpg", "date_published": "2024-03-06T22:39:47Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:59Z", "tags": [ "Germany", "fascism", "anti-fascism" ], "content_html": "Socrates: It’s simple, everything is very simple. The most important thing is that people don’t aim to gain power. If they want power, then by definition they are not one of us.
\n\nVoice from the audience: What should we aim for then?
\n\nSocrates: What should we aim for? For life. For a free life, for self-realization, for knowledge, for the stars for goodness’ sake. But definitely not for power.
\n
The far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (“Alternative for Germany,” AfD) has been gaining momentum in German politics since 2017, when they entered the parliament. On January 10, 2024, the investigative journalism group Correctiv published a report that the previous November, prominent members of the AfD had met with a member of the “Identitarian Movement” (a pan-European fascist and ethno-nationalist party) at a mansion outside Berlin to devise a plot to deport millions of immigrants, including those with German citizenship. This precipitated a wave of demonstrations around Germany. In the following translation and interview, German anti-fascists explore the rise of fascist politics in Germany and the potential of the mobilizations against it.
\n\nAlthough the initial wave of demonstrations has passed, smaller demonstrations are still taking place, especially in small towns in Saxony. A protest is planned in Pirna on March 26, when the first AfD politician will be sworn in as mayor of a town. As fascist parties gain momentum around Europe, it is urgent to draw more people into material efforts to stop them.
\n\nThanks to Jannis Grosse for the photographs.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/06/1.jpg\")
“AfD=Fascism.” On Saturday, February 24, 2024, some 350 anti-fascists marched in memory of Mehmet Turgut in Rostock. Twenty years ago, on February 25, 2004, Mehmet was murdered by Nazis in a snack bar in the Rostock-Toitenwinkel district. At the demonstration in February 2024, speakers called for the street where Turgut was murdered to be named after him, as his family has wanted for ten years. Photograph by Jannis Grosse.
\nA statement from Black Mosquito, an anarchist distribution project based in Flensburg.
\n\nWho would have expected it? Suddenly, millions in Germany are taking to the streets against the shift to the right and the fascist AfD, and in favor of a society based on solidarity. One record number trumped the next, numerous rallies and demonstrations could not even get off the ground due to overcrowding—in Flensburg, the demonstration moved through the city in a closed circle. More and more smaller towns, in the supposedly quiet countryside for Nazis, are also reporting protests, while encountering massive obstacles in some cases. We too are somewhat moved, pleased to see a break from the lethargy.
\n\nAnd yes, there is much to criticize. Now those who have just allowed themselves to be politically chased through parliament by the AfD, who have just pushed through stricter deportation policies and impoverishment measures, are hypocritically styling themselves as saviors of democracy and human rights. In the course of the protest, an attempt is being made to swear everyone back in to the nation that has become good again with anti-fascist gestures and anti-social policies; a swearing in to parliamentary democracy and liberal economics, which have created many of these injustices and the breeding ground for fascism in the first place (more on this, for example, in our translation of From Democracy to Freedom). We hope for critical interventions, content, and texts. But in all of this, we should not fall for the trap of big politics and confuse those who are taking to the streets with us and are possibly in some local group associated with some left-liberal party with the politics of that party itself. The majority of people are standing beside us out of conviction and in clear rejection of fascist politics.
\n\nSome of us are reminded of the “uprising of the decent” [in the year 2000], when hundreds of thousands took to the streets against an anti-Semitic arson attack and other right-wing acts of violence. Although the masses quickly returned to their comfortable sofas, the demonstrations opened up spaces in which people could find each other, connect, and network. Those were times when people got a tailwind, when we village anti-fascists didn’t feel alone and the fascists didn’t dare to take to the streets with such confidence. These connections and groups remained afterwards—and some of them still do today.
\n\nIf we manage to take something similar from this momentum, we will have gained a lot. If thousands take to the streets again and again in response to the next scandal about fascist plans for a coup, much would be gained. But even if it remains just a few organized anti-fascists who can act with more support in society, that will also be something. Because, as the AfD itself knows, “Antifa [is] the biggest obstacle for the right.”
\n\nAnti-fascism means more than broad alliances on the streets. It requires research, education, blockades, and direct, tangible interventions. Now is exactly the right time to take action against local fascist meeting places, to create new structures and to join forces across ideological boundaries. And right now, we must not forget those who are facing repression for their alleged practical anti-fascism—which is why we are supporting the campaign against the extradition of anti-fascists to Hungary.
\n\nSiamo Tutti Antifa,
\n\nthe BM crew
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/06/2.jpg\")
Nearly 100,000 people demonstrating against the far right in Hamburg on January 28, 2024. Photograph by Jannis Grosse.
\nWe conducted the following interview with anti-fascists in the north of Germany who have been active in various groups for many years. They desired to preserve their anonymity.
\n\nThe AfD has accumulated considerable momentum since the pandemic. According to one report, “Recent polling put the party in second place nationally with support of around 23%, far above the 10.3% of the vote it won during the last federal election in 2021.” Why has the AfD been able to more than double its support in less than three years? What is the larger context of this political shift in Germany?
\n\nWe are seeing a general shift to the right. The governing coalition comprised of the “traffic light parties”—the SPD [Social Democratic Party] being red, Die Grünen [the Green Party] green, and the FDP [Free Democratic Party] yellow, hence the “traffic light”—are hardly distinguishable in their policies. The SPD and Greens, the supposed “left” parties, are being pushed towards neoliberal policies by the FDP, and they go along for fear of breaking the ruling coalition. In addition, the major “people’s parties” [the Volksparteien, including the Christian Democratic Union, the SPD, the FDP, and the Greens] are all trying to pick up votes on the right-wing fringe and catering to right-wing demands from the majority of society. And unfortunately, there is a right-wing potential in German society, which has now found a voice in a right-wing populist party through the AfD.
\n\nThe AfD has also become better structured internally, better trained, and has created networks. According to various studies and polls, the AfD can draw on a voter potential of 20-30 percent with its extreme right-wing positions. It has succeeded in retaining this core electorate. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and the government’s protective measures, a protest milieu has emerged that refuses to engage in democratic negotiation processes and is more interested in constructing personified images of an enemy. This imaging of the enemy can be used to depict supposed or actual elites, such as representatives of the government, but it can also target figures from science and the established media. It is about a generally negative attitude based on an authoritarian worldview. The focus is on holding on to and preserving one’s own privileges, which means opposing much-needed economic and ecological changes.
\n\nThe AfD has succeeded in integrating the motif of a supposed struggle of the elites against the people into its narrative. This allows it to constitute itself as the parliamentary arm of younger protest movements.
\n\nTo what extent is this a conflict between different regions in Germany? What are the causes?
\n\nThere has always been a rural/urban divide. In the city, there are more bourgeois, cosmopolitan structures; these can also be racist and right-wing, of course, but they tend not to be openly fascist. Many right-wingers have settled in the countryside, where they live and work.
\n\nDivisions between east and west are also a problem. In the so-called DDR (the German Democratic Republic, commonly known as East Germany), there was a prescribed state anti-fascism, but in fact the state simply ignored right-wing structures. Officially, according to the government, no neo-Nazism existed—even though in fact, it did exist. There were hardly any forces in civil society acting against the right; there was a small grassroots anti-fascist movement, but it was criminalized.
\n\nAfter the reunification of Germany [in 1990-1991], a lot of West German neo-Nazis moved to the east and began to establish structures. The worst riots against migrants in living memory took place as a result, from August 22 to 24, 1992, in the Lichtenhagen district of Rostock. Nazis all over Germany emulated this, and the so-called “Baseballschläger-Jahre” [the “baseball bat years”] began. From 1990 to 2000, right-wing terror and street violence were common—and not only in the “neuen Bundesländern” [the former east German states].
\n\nOver thirty years later, the consequences of that can still be felt.
\n\nThe massive street protests in East Germany are also nourished by the experience of having overcome a system once before. This feeds into references to the protest movements at the end of the GDR [the German Democratic Republic, known as East Germany], but also into slogans such as “We are the people.” There was no equivalent in West Germany. Overall, conservative parties in the West have long endeavored not to allow any effective political actors to emerge to their right. However, supporters of these revanchist, racist, and right-wing conservative positions have felt less and less represented by a modernized conservatism, and the AfD has been able to use this circumstance to its advantage in the West.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/06/3.jpg\")
A demonstration in Hamburg on January 28, 2024. Photograph by Jannis Grosse.
\nWhy have the far right been so successful in using immigration as an issue? Are there any other issues they have also been able to use to build support?
\n\nImmigration has been a major issue in Germany, especially from 2015 onwards. The social situation at the time was very divisive. Right-wing populist parties like AfD and fascist groups like Generation Identity sought to spread fear of migrants, using lies such as the idea that refugees pose a threat to women and children or that the welfare state could not afford to accommodate refugees. When refugees were settled in parts of Germany where the residents were unfriendly and racist, right-wing groups and parties led the protests against refugee camps.
\n\nThe far right capitalized on this division for recruitment, while the AfD took up the issue in the election campaigns. In general, right-wing parties are currently gaining support from those who reject the positions of the established parties (the “traffic light” coalition) around the issues of “climate change” and racism.
\n\nSome of the places that the far right has been most successful in Germany, such as small towns in eastern Germany—and across Europe as a whole, such as Hungary—are not the places that immigrants are going in the first place.
\n\nThere is a lot of racism in Germany, which is also shared in the mainstream of society. This sort of racism works even without any real migrants. It is about prejudice, hatred, and ingrained attitudes like nationalism and authoritarianism. There is no need for real migrants to make this ideology convincing. It is most effective when people can project their fears onto imagined migrants.
\n\nCompare the rise of the far right in Germany to what has happened in other European countries—such as the Netherlands, Italy, France, Hungary—and the United States.
\n\nWe can see many similarities to the rise of the extreme right in other European countries. For example, in all of these countries, the conservative parties in particular are no longer succeeding in reconciling the neoliberal policies of the European Union with the demands of local nationalists. In some ways, this is the result of attempts to modernize the conservative parties by updating their agendas and public image, which has coincided with a part of the conservative base radicalizing. Quite a few former members of the CDU [the Christian Democratic Union of Germany] can now be found in the AfD. We are also seeing this “crisis of conservatism” in many European countries. Many people are attracted to the idea of returning to the model of nation states that are free to decide on migration, their own economy, and other things independently of political developments in the EU; they assume that this would mean overcoming a supposed disadvantage.
\n\nAnother factor is the common migration policy of the European Union, which has been increasingly aimed at sealing itself off, while at the same time individual states still rely on the immigration of certain people, such as specialized professional groups. Various European right-wing parties are exploiting this ambivalence. According to their simplistic logic, all our supposed social problems could be solved simply by individual states consistently sealing themselves off from the outside world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/06/4.jpg\")
A demonstration in Hamburg on January 28, 2024. Photograph by Jannis Grosse.
\nHow important was the article published by the investigative journalists’ group Correctiv? To what extent do you think that “revealing information” has a role to play in mobilizing people against the far right?
\n\nThe research was important in order to make it clear to a broad section of society what lies behind the ideas and slogans of the AfD and other right-wing parties. The links between conservatives (CDU) and right-wing populists (AfD) have also become clear once again. The fact that this research was picked up by almost all daily newspapers, TV stations and mainstream media also contributed to making many people show up at the demonstrations.
\n\nThese links were not news to the radical left. The information and the networks and structures were already known. However, it is of little use if some radical anti-fascists know about it, but it is not communicated to society. Antifa research is good and important, but it’s also important how and where the information is placed. And despite all the love for the big demonstrations—they are this big because the established parties promote them and act as speakers themselves. This is dishonest, because the SPD and the Greens are at least as guilty of racism and deportations because of their role in tightening the laws as the AfD and the fascists are of incitement and violence against refugees.
\n\nWhat has been the political impact in Germany of recent shifts in the information landscape, with the spread of disinformation and the control of social media platforms by rival factions of the elite?
\n\nIn Germany, the fascist group “Identitäre bewegung” was banned by Facebook and YouTube before this shift. That had a massive Impact on them. The latest shifts have not made much of a difference in Germany compared to the United States, except on X/Twitter, where right-wing trolls have gotten a massive boost.
\n\nFascists have been using social media all along. The far right has long used social media channels such as Telegram and Instagram for its propaganda and networking. In recent years, however, they have also increasingly been using TikTok. The companies/providers let fascists get away with it because they cannot be held responsible under German law. Most of the companies are based in the USA and have much more permissive laws than Germany does when it comes to the use of Nazi symbols, for example. In Germany, such symbols are prohibited.
\n\nThe extreme right-wing and conspiracy ideology scene has created its own media formats that contribute to the spread of disinformation based on conspiracy narratives and, in some cases, deliberately false reports. They are quite successful at this, partly because this type of media consumption is suitable for confirming their own worldview. Within this worldview, established media are only portrayed as the mouthpieces of the elites or government and as untrustworthy or controlled. This is problematic insofar as it goes hand in hand with a refusal to seek to understand complex processes or social dynamics or to enter into political debate.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/06/6.jpg\")
On Saturday, February 3, following a football game in Hamburg, several thousand people joined FC St. Pauli fans to demonstrate against right-wing politics. “The vast majority of people here and at the other demonstrations are protesting not only against the AfD, but against the increasing shift to the right—we don’t care at all which party is pushing it,” one speaker declared to applause at the beginning of the demonstration. Photograph by Jannis Grosse.
\nDescribe the wave of protests in Germany over the past few weeks. Who has benefitted from them, and how?
\n\nThe protests chiefly consist of large rallies and demonstrations that always involve broad coalitions, are nonviolent, and are accepted by the cops. These are signs that the parties currently in power are also interested in these demonstrations. As anti-fascists, we are more used to police attacking us and trying to prevent us from taking direct actions against Nazis.
\n\nOn the other hand, many activists certainly benefited, especially in smaller towns, where people who have been campaigning for a diverse and open society for years finally saw a noticeable increase in their numbers. Especially in places with a right-wing hegemony on the streets or in politics, such moments can give strength, regardless of how long the protests continue. This is probably one of the biggest challenges of the coming months: will some of those who are now taking to the streets against the AfD become integrated into long-term organizing processes, or will this be nothing more than a short-lived expression of outrage?
\n\nWhat strategies are the centrist political parties using to try to channel and control this movement?
\n\nThey are presenting themselves as true anti-fascists, giving speeches at the large coalition demonstrations or even calling for the demonstrations themselves. In addition, large alliances sometimes try to exclude left or radical left positions. As a reminder: a few weeks ago, the current government passed the biggest and most blatant tightening of the asylum laws in years. At the same time, they are upset about the AfD and its phrasing. In terms of racist content, there is hardly any difference.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/06/5.jpg\")
Anarchists and anti-fascists in the mass mobilizations. Photograph by Jannis Grosse.
\nWere there places in Germany where anti-fascists succeeded in using this opportunity to connect with people and build momentum? What strategies can you propose for anarchists and anti-authoritarians to engage with people and take action in such moments, when large numbers of people are suddenly motivated to respond to the rise of the far right?
\n\nIndividually and regionally, people have certainly become politicized through the big demonstrations and are looking to network with local leftists. Such demonstrations are also a good way to reassure your friends and comrades that you are not alone.
\n\nBut so far, the demonstrations have not had any social impact. The AfD, which was the target of the demonstrations, was able to gain even more percentage points in the polls for the upcoming elections. We call on people to get actively involved in such mobilizations. Make your own blocs, be there with banners and fliers and try to create a radical left-wing image. In addition, politicians who belong to parties that are themselves racist should be booed and forced off the stage.
\n\nFurthermore, the demonstrations are not as big everywhere. Especially in the east or in the countryside, the demonstrations are smaller and sometimes neo-Nazis provoke people from the sidelines. There, it is important to protect your own structures and chase the neo-Nazis away.
\n\nIn the long run, what do you think it will take to prevent the far right from coming to power, to prevent centrist political parties from adopting the policies of the far right, and to build an anti-fascist movement that can transform society?
\n\nThe main problem is that the parties of the “traffic light” coalition are pursuing neoliberal policies through and through. Solidarity and the welfare state are just empty words. Austerity measures are being implemented everywhere and fears of decline are being stirred up among the “middle classes.” However, the majority of society and other fans of authoritarianism are not looking for the causes in the system itself, but are looking for scapegoats to blame. The scapegoats include not only the right (such as the AfD), but also the parties of the traffic light, the poor, refugees, and others.
\n\nWe need to campaign for more solidarity within society, we need to proactively protect our structures and friends—both from Nazis and from cops. More militant options must be used in dealing with the right. At the same time, we must prevent established politics from co-opting the major protests.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/06/7.jpg\")
Demonstrators in the St. Pauli neighborhood of Hamburg on February 3, 2024. Photograph by Jannis Grosse.
\n\n\n\nSome anti-fascists have feared that in resisting far-right parties, we could drive more right-wing conservatives into supporting them. But fascists are not created by opposition to fascism—they are the result of successful fascist recruiting. We should seek to alienate people from the far right by all means—for example, by excluding AfD members from all public events, including family gatherings, bars, and concerts. It should not be possible for them to create the impression that they receive tacit support from the rest of the population, nor to cultivate an air of political and social legitimacy.
\n\nIn some German cities, such as Flensburg, the AfD have been unable to find locations to host their events, and when they have organized public activities there has been so much resistance that these could only take place due to a major police presence. Where the AfD has met powerful street resistance, they have not been able to increase their percentage of the vote as significantly. This may simply be correlation, rather than causation, but no one joins a fascist party to be a victim. When participating in fascist activity fails to help them achieve their goals or give them an outlet for their agency, we can hope that they will ultimately focus on other things.
\n\n-The Rise of Neo-Fascism in Germany (October 2017)
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2024/03/06/8.jpg\")
Photograph by Jannis Grosse.
\nWe’ve reprinted our classic gender subversion poster, “For Every Girl/For Every Boy.” To mark the occasion, we’ve also printed a new poster in homage to the original, celebrating collective resistance to the forms of gender fascism threatening us today. Here, we offer a deep dive into the legacy of the original poster, exploring the tension between gender abolition and gender self-determination.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/6.jpg\")
Our classic gender subversion poster. Click on the image to order the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/5.jpg\")
Our new poster celebrating gender self-determination. Click on the image to order the poster.
\nTwenty years ago, we published the gender subversion poster, drawing on the creative work of Nancy R. Smith, Jacinta Bunnell, Laura Ann Newburn, Irit Reinheimer, and others. Over the following decades, we distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of the poster.
\n\n\n\n\nThese posters have made their way around the world, into classrooms, libraries, clinics, guidance counselor’s offices, pride marches, dorm rooms, shelters, punk houses, teenage bedrooms, and colleges… I regularly receive texts from friends who spot this poster in all manner of places, sometimes even on a wall in a TV show. Recently, my friend Neko Case sent me a photo of the poster from the green room of Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
\n\n \n
Comrades printed the poster in Spanish, German, Ukrainian, and various other languages.
\n\nIn September 2021, we let the poster go out of print. At the time, it seemed that our society was progressing towards more expansive ways of understanding gender. Since then, unfortunately, a reactionary offensive led by bigots and far-right politicians has gained ground, using the state to intensify the subjugation of women and to impose new forms of violence on trans, queer, and nonbinary people and those who support them. At the same time, we continued to receive requests for us to reprint the original poster. In the end, we decided to put another run of them in circulation, while also producing a new version that speaks to the terrain of struggles over gender that we face in 2023.
\n\nAs before, we are distributing both versions for the costs of printing and postage alone. We have never sought to make money off this project, only to do our part to create a world in which all of us can make the most of our potential on our own terms, however that looks for each of us—a more welcoming and supportive world, without imposed gender norms or bigotry.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/2.jpg\")
The artwork from the Portuguese version of our gender poster sighted at the Vaca Louca Café in Maringá, Brazil.
\nTwenty years ago, our poster had the audacity to ask: “What would the world look like without gender?” Since then, this question has become even more urgent—and even more challenging to answer.
\n\nOn the one hand, we’ve witnessed major shifts in cultural understandings of gender. As Jacinta Bunnell explains, when the original poster appeared,
\n\n\n\n\n“There was not a culturally unified language for talking about gender fluidity at this point; so much of how we spoke of gender was still either/or.”
\n
Today, nonbinary identities and gender-neutral pronouns have emerged from trans/queer subcultures and online communities into workplaces, schools, and public debates. Trans communities have received unprecedented visibility.
\n\nOn the other hand, what had been a rising wave of conservative backlash has grown into a tsunami. It is no exaggeration to describe the reactionary program as gender fascism. As the popular saying goes, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” The struggle for gender self-determination has reached the “then they fight you” stage. Today, access to abortion care has been severely restricted in large regions of the US, while hundreds of proposed laws target trans people, especially youth, with restrictions on medical care, participation in sports, bathroom access, legal documentation, entertainment and culture, and more. At the same time, heads of state are citing the preservation of gender roles among their chief justifications for full-scale wars.
\n\nYet at the same time that reactionaries are attempting to use state power to crush gender non-conformity and eliminate reproductive autonomy, the identity politics that emerged from 20th century liberation struggles are experiencing a crisis.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/3.jpg\")
An illustration from the back of our classic gender poster.
\nWe saw evidence of this on the second day of Donald Trump’s administration in 2017. The Women’s March protests in Washington, DC and around the US were among the most widely attended protests in a decade or more. But anarchists and other radicals largely focused on other priorities, and the massive energy of the mobilization dissipated quickly—in part because the category of “woman” does not suffice to describe all those who suffer as a consequence of gender oppression.
\n\nThe right-wing culture war offensive on the terrain of gender seeks to take advantage of this crisis. While the breadth of support for abortion rights worries Republican strategists who are concerned with their electoral prospects, the right is gambling that it can target trans people with impunity, seeing them as a small and politically less powerful demographic ripe for scapegoating. By framing their attacks as defenses against existential threats to children, the family, and the gender order itself, they have inflamed their base with a sense of mission that identity-based coalitions have not been able to overcome.
\n\nThe same social changes that have uprooted fixed notions of gender and enabled more expansive ways of being have also destabilized models of organizing that relied on coherent notions of identity. We need new ways of understanding ourselves to fight the forces that divide and oppress us, new ways to conceptualize who we are and what we can become. As a Brazilian comrade put it,
\n\n\n\n\nIt is no longer possible to organize a collective action that still holds on to any fiction about “being a woman”; it is not possible to ignore the complicities of white/bourgeois feminism with colonial/racial power. The crisis of feminism is the vanguard of the revolutionary political crisis: there is no longer a subject of history; the demand for recognition/representativeness was swallowed up by neoliberal devices; there is no identity politics that can unite us; really, we don’t want to be part of the same story, we no longer want to organize our desires for a good and dignified life into a state grammar that can govern our lives. The beauty of feminism’s implosion is that it lets us see the hundreds of sharp shards we still have left. Feminism becomes a shattered place, but a place of investigation into what political action can be within life, with life and not outside it; what can make us dangerous again; how are we going to escape all these gender and identity traps?”
\n\n \n
These “gender and identity traps” loom all around us, and the stakes are urgent. How do we resist the rising tide of gender fascism without reverting to models of identity that no longer serve us?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/1.jpg\")
The poster in German, hanging on a classroom wall.
\nOne way to imagine our way towards the original poster’s provocation—“What would the world look like without gender?”—is to propose gender abolition. Inspired by the movements against the prison industrial complex that propose not more comfortable cages but an end to caging altogether, we could propose that gender itself is an oppressive system that cannot be reformed. This is not the same as saying that “gender isn’t real”—if it weren’t, there would be no need to abolish it!—but rather to insist that just as it has been constructed, it can be deconstructed.
\n\nWhat is gender, after all? As we know it, gender divides a wide range of human qualities and capabilities into mutually exclusive categories, such as “masculine” and “feminine.” This artificial division requires a wide range of forces—social pressures, policing, assorted mythologies, and a variety of technologies from laser hair removal to steroids and Viagra—to uphold the illusion that people come in two standard models rather than a wide spectrum of possibilities. To abolish gender would mean dismantling these varied systems of coercion that force us into one of two narrow boxes while hierarchically ranking them and punishing anyone who pushes their limits.
\n\nUnfortunately, some trans-exclusionary “radical feminists” have attempted to appropriate the language of “gender abolition” to describe their own hateful project. As contradictory as this may seem—given their efforts to gatekeep who counts as a woman and their alliances with the anti-feminist extreme right—they insist that gender, as a system of patriarchal social norms, perpetuates harm against people of the female sex. By itself, this assertion sounds reasonable—until they continue that, therefore, trans people are somehow uniquely responsible for upholding gender and thus causing harm to “women.” This cruel argument pits some victims of gender oppression against others, blaming trans people for their efforts to survive in a system they didn’t create. The supposed “abolition” that these transphobic activists pay lip service to only reinforces the rigid essentialism of sex, further stigmatizing efforts to shape our bodies and lives on our own terms. In fact, it can only perpetuate gender as we know it, not abolish it.
\n\nConfronting this context, we need to be clear about precisely what gender abolition in the service of liberation could mean today.
\n\nAs an alternate framework, we propose gender self-determination, insisting on our autonomy to shape our bodies, presentations, and identities according to our own needs and desires. As we argued last year,
\n\n\n\n\nBy shifting the discussion from the limits of rights to the horizon of self-determination, we propose a radically different world, in which no authorities—neither governments, religions, nuclear families, nor anything else—can confine us within their narrow visions of who we should be and who we can become.
\n
What could this look like in practice? We’ve seen an explosion of creative new forms of gender identification in recent years, with new language and pronouns expanding far beyond binaries of male/female and cis/trans. These are encouraging, but they may not suffice to dislodge the power of imposed gender norms to shape the material circumstances of our everyday lives. Self-determination must mean more than choice in a consumer framework, a maximum of individual options for constructing our online profiles and Amazon wish-lists. In an alienated consumer society in which we are constantly being appraised and compelled to sell ourselves, defining ourselves with ever more precise categories and hashtags will not be enough to get us free.
\n\nOthers have argued that we can appropriate pharmaceutical and surgical technologies to experiment with producing gender according to our own preferences. That’s an important start—and necessary, even life-saving, for some—and furious right-wing efforts to restrict our access to these methods indicates the threat they pose to guardians of the gender order. Nonetheless, so long as some gendered qualities and categories are valued while others are not, seizing the biomedical means of production to give us more latitude to construct our bodies and identities still will not serve undermine all the different ways that the prevailing gender roles constrain and oppress people.
\n\nHow might we approach the task of undoing gender, combining the best elements of gender abolition and gender self-determination? By identifying which aspects of gender need abolishing, we can propose some points of departure:
\n\nAbolish gender segregation—ensure that people of all genders have access to the same opportunities, resources, social spaces, and forms of agency.
\nAbolish fixed gender roles—break the association between certain traits and certain genders, demonstrating new constellations of the qualities and capabilities that are currently associated with one gender or another. As the original poster suggests, you can be strong without being a boy and sensitive without being a girl; while this sentiment is increasingly accepted today, how much further can we go towards breaking free of the fixed roles and binaries that organize our thinking about human beings?
\nAbolish gender hierarchies—End practices that privilege one gender over another, and those that value some qualities and capabilities over others because of the gender they are associated with. Hillary Clinton becoming president would not have served to qualify our society as feminist—if a person of any gender has to outdo all other contenders in demonstrating traditionally masculine characteristics in order to get a foothold in politics, and if all political institutions continue functioning according to patriarchal priorities and protocols, gender oppression remains in effect even if not everyone in a position of power is a man.
\nAbolish gender gatekeeping—Do away with the boundaries that control who can identify with any gender. Defending trans identity, gender nonconformity, and other departures from fixed binary gender represents a step towards this goal.
\nAbolishing these dimensions of gender can create the space for the free flourishing of all people outside of oppressive roles and identities. We can affirm both the creative impulses that lead millions of people today to define themselves in gendered terms outside of birth assignments and binaries, while also taking aim at the structural conditions that constrain our lives regardless of how we identify.
\n\nAs anarchists, we believe that we can only be free when all of us are free, and that everything that expands the horizons of freedom for others will benefit us, too. Nowhere is this plainer than on the terrain of gender.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/4.jpg\")
The classic poster.
\nThis is why we have prepared a remix of our classic gender poster. The front of the new version reads,
\n\n\n\n\nFor every fascist who plans to attack drag queen story hour, there are three anti-fascists ready to defend it. For every boss who harasses you, there are ten workers who will back you up. For every judge who seeks to ban abortion, there are twenty collectives stockpiling Mifepristone and Misoprostol. For every cop who is paid to enforce transphobic legislation, there are a hundred gender outlaws determined to defy them. For every politician who tries to prohibit talking about gender in school, there are a thousand students charting their own paths beyond the binary. For every bigot who wants to etch their biases in stone, there is a movement that is already changing the world. For every person that takes one step towards freedom, there is another who finds the road to liberation a little easier.
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The back of the poster presents a revised excerpt from our text, “The Fight for Gender Self-Determination.”
\n\nWe hope that both of these posters of ours—both the classic one and the new remix—can play a part in new efforts towards getting free of gender norms. May they continue to hang in grade-school classrooms and collective houses, breaking up old models and assumptions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/06/12/7.jpg\")
The back of our new poster celebrating gender self-determination. Click on the image to order the poster.
\nOn Saturday, January 12, 2002, hundreds of neo-Nazis gathered in York, Pennsylvania to promote white supremacy. Anarchists and other opponents of fascism throughout the region mobilized to prevent them from achieving their purpose.
\n\nAs usual, the police did everything they could to protect the neo-Nazis. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, officers arrested 25 people, “all but two of them anti-racists.” Nevertheless, the anti-fascists made common cause with locals and sent the fascists packing from York.
\n\nTwenty-one years later, a participant in the battle of York recounts the clashes of that day and reflects on what has changed since then, comparing the events in York with those in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017.
\n\nThe following account is adapted from a forthcoming memoir on PM Press, entitled The Anarchist International. You can read more from the same author here.
\n\nIt was the year 2002 and I was in an anarchist organization. The attacks of September 11, 2001 four months earlier had put a damper on many of the movements we had participated in, clearing the way for jingoistic patriotism and warmongering. Nonetheless—for precisely that reason—we were determined to continue our efforts at full throttle.
\n\nOne of our focuses was combatting fascist organizing. Our print publication, Barricada, was militantly and vocally anti-fascist. We regularly mobilized against fascist rallies and events. We included a “Bloody Nazi of the Month” picture section in our publication, in which we outed the names, addresses, and license plates of fascists.
\n\nThe Nazis were hailing their upcoming gathering in York, Pennsylvania as a “great unifying rally,” with confirmed attendance from the infamously violent Eastern Hammerskins as well as the two leading racist organizations of that time, the National Alliance and the World Church of the Creator. They had called for a rally and a public meeting at the city library in York because the city was embroiled in a controversy regarding the involvement of Mayor Charles Robertson in a 1969 race riot that had culminated in the death of a young Black woman at the hands of a white mob. Robertson, who had been a police officer in 1969, had finally been arrested and charged with her murder. Despite the arrest and charges, Mr. Robertson refused to resign, outraging York’s African-American community. The white supremacists were rallying to his defense, and Matthew Hale, leader of the World Church of the Creator, was to be the “keynote speaker.”
\n\nBy 2002, Matt Hale and his organization, the World Church of the Creator, had been growing steadily for several years. Hale had appeared in several television interviews, where he could be seen wiping his feet with an Israeli flag as he entered his home, proclaiming himself Pontificus Maximus [sic] of his “church,” and promoting “The White Man’s Bible,” calling for “rahowa,” short for “Racial Holy War.” Their flag was red with a white circle in the middle bearing a “W” instead of a swastika.
\n\nToday, Matthew Hale is serving a 40-year prison sentence for attempting to solicit an undercover FBI informant to murder a federal judge. His organization has been superseded by a series of other such groups. But in 2002, anti-fascists had to take him and the World Church of the Creator seriously alongside the National Alliance, another of the most dangerous fascist organizations of that time.
\n\nWe had already had the pleasure of meeting some of these fine representatives of the Aryan race a few months earlier in Wallingford, Connecticut. In fact, the mobilization to counter their public meeting at the Wallingford Public Library had been so successful that many people were skeptical that it would be possible to accomplish much in terms of direct confrontation in York. A small contingent of primarily Boston anti-fascists had mobilized to Wallingford; upon arriving at the library, they were pleasantly surprised to see that the police had failed to create any kind of physical division between the Nazis who had assembled outside and the growing crowd of anti-fascist protestors. Afterwards, we hypothesized that this was due to the fact that the New England area had experienced a lull in public fascist organizing, so local police were unprepared for militant anti-fascist opposition, black blocs at that time being largely reserved for summits and party conventions.
\n\nThe Hartford Courant described the events:
\n\n\n\n\n1:30 p.m. — A large group of protesters surges into the parking lot. Many have scarves and handkerchiefs covering their faces.
\n\n“Racist, sexist, anti-gay! Matt Hale, go away!” they chant. A young man briefly tussles with a Hale supporter. A police officer reaches in. “Hey, watch it! Watch it!” the cop yells.
\n\n[…]
\n\nMany of the protesters are college students. They carry signs that read “Racial harmony not racial holy war.” They are from Boston, Washington, and Philadelphia. Some are members of the Connecticut Global Action Network, which also organized during the Seattle protests against the World Bank last fall. Another group of activists from Boston describes itself as “an anarchist collective.
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“Large” was a generous descriptor; the bloc numbered somewhere between 25 and 40 people. As the cops watched this small but tight-knit black bloc advance swiftly towards the racists holding neo-Nazi and confederate flags, they remained surprisingly passive. Never inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth, the anti-fascists quickly charged the racists. The ensuing brief but lively confrontation resulted in the Nazis losing several flags and gaining a few injuries. Police eventually intervened with pepper spray to break up the mêlée, rescuing the “Pontificus Maximus” in the back of a police cruiser.
\n\nMatthew Hale returned to Wallingford a month later. This time, those who turned out to oppose him faced a radically different scenario. Despite the New York Times and other outlets reporting that there had been only “minor scuffles,” police had no desire to lose control again. This time, as one reporter put it, “police preparations that were made days ahead of time—including dug-in telephone pole barricades and blocks of concrete the size of cars—kept Hale supporters and protesters apart.”
\n\nIf memory serves, I believe there were police officers armed with pepper ball guns mounted on elevated platforms along the perimeter of the barricades.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/01/11/4.jpg\")
Flanked by neo-Nazis, Matthew Hale awaits instructions from his chief protectors, the police, in Wallingford, Connecticut on April 21, 2001.
\nWe organized in a network of perhaps 50 or 60 comrades, mostly comprised of anti-fascists from Columbus, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC. We ourselves had coordinated privately beforehand in a tight-knit group, primarily consisting of NEFAC [Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists] and ARA [Anti-Racist Action] groups. We saw these joint mobilizations as an opportunity to work with others outside our immediate circles in order to build an anarchist fighting force that could mobilize swiftly and discreetly.
\n\nWe had just stepped out of the strip mall parking lot that we had chosen as our meeting point and into the outskirts of York when somebody yelled out, “Oh shit, look at that truck!”
\n\nWe couldn’t believe our eyes. There was a red pickup truck about 30 meters away from us, like any other except for the distinctive decal on its rear bumper: the upside-down peace sign of the National Alliance. As we began to move towards them, the Nazis yelled something and sped off, tires screeching dramatically as they made their escape. A few of us made commendable yet futile attempts to reach the truck as they ran the light. Sadly, no amount of youth, training, enthusiasm, or political analysis can enable you to match the speed of an automobile on foot.
\n\nWe had just resigned ourselves to this when the red pickup truck reappeared, having apparently circled the block. Just then, the light at the corner turned red, trapping the Nazis between other stopped vehicles! Five or six of us sprinted toward them once more. Glass shattered and the inside of the truck was generously doused with pepper spray.
\n\nBarricada describes the ensuing confrontation thus:
\n\n\n\n\n“At this point, the two Nazis, the bravest of the day, decided to jump out of the car and confront the crowd, the driver wielding a baton in his hand. As he faced off with one anti-fascist, others circled around him and attacked his car from the front. At one point, however, taking advantage of a distraction, the driver jumped back into his vehicle and sped away, leaving his passenger to dive into the back of the pickup already in motion (a true “Great Moments in White Pride” scene). The driver of the truck was later identified as Jeff Omasta, of Edgewood, Maryland.”
\n
This skirmish, while emboldening, also drew us a police escort, in the form of a squad of riot cops on foot. They didn’t seem to be seeking a confrontation, nor did they appear to have any intention of carrying out arrests. They consistently kept a distance of a half block or more. We deduced that their objective was to keep us out of York’s inner city and away from the library.
\n\nBeing tight-knit and well-organized, we managed to outmaneuver and outrun them. With the cops between us and the library, we marched the other direction, then turned and moved as fast as possible down the next parallel street back toward the city. The cops figured out what we were doing and tried to cut us off at the next intersection, but it was too late.
\n\nA preacher was loudly preaching “the white man’s gospel” at the police barricade in front of the city library. He was waving a copy of “The White Man’s Bible” around, the way a regular bible thumper might brandish the Good Book. He kept on yelling right in front of a wall of cops as a mob of black-clad masked anti-fascists approached him.
\n\nThe York Daily Record describes the scene:
\n\n\n\n\nThe anarchists wound up at the intersection of East Market and Duke streets, where police had erected a barricade. As they milled in the street, a man who said his name was John King and identified himself as a World Church of the Creator member from Virginia held up a copy of the church’s holy book, “The White Man’s Bible,” and taunted the anarchists… One of the protesters snatched his book and threw it in the street.
\n\n“Can I have my book back?” King asked. He looked at several police officers nearby for help, but they responded with a look that said King was on his own.”
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Indeed, without word or violence but in plain view of the cops, I had relieved him of his “bible.” The cover promised it to be “a powerful religious creed and program for the survival, expansion, and advancement of the white race.” A must-read for an inquisitive Jew such as myself!
\n\nHe began yelling to the cops that he had been robbed. The newspaper, while wrong about the “bible” being tossed into the street, is indeed correct that none of them intervened. We took note of this: it was the second indication of the day that they were not keen on a confrontation. I tucked the book inside my jacket and schlepped it with me all day rather than doing the safe thing and throwing it into the nearest garbage can. You could blame the football hooligan culture I grew up around for the “trophy hunter” mentality, but displaying of confiscated fascist propaganda after the fact sends a powerful message to both friend and foe alike. I consider it a valid political tool.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/01/11/8.jpg\")
Neo-Nazis waving German battle flags in York on January 12, 2002.
\nOnce we had reached the vicinity of the library, after the incident with the preacher, there were a few minutes of aimless milling around as we discussed what our next steps should be, as we assumed most Nazis were probably already inside the building. At this point, a group of three men caught our attention. They were youngish, probably late twenties or so, muscular build, short cropped hair, no distinguishing patches or visible tattoos, one of them wearing a bomber jacket, all of them eyeing us suspiciously. After a bit of hesitation, they began moving towards the police barricades in order to enter the library.
\n\nBeing the inquisitive and friendly kids that we were, we thought it would be proper to have a quick chat with them first.
\n\n“Hey hey hey, what’s the rush?”
\n\n“Are you a Nazi?”
\n\n“Are you looking for your friends inside?”
\n\nWe asked the basic icebreakers while blocking the way. All the attention and questions must have made them a little shy, because they didn’t seem to want to chat with us. Suddenly, one of the comrades lost patience—frustrated with their lack of social skills, no doubt—and a flagpole struck the head of one of them with a loud “crack.”
\n\nIn that instant, one of them whipped around while putting his hand in his jacket. I distinctly remember thinking “Oh shit, gun.” Maybe the comrade with the bulletproof vest hadn’t been exaggerating about the risk. This was Pennsylvania, after all.
\n\nThen we realized that the shiny metal object in his hand wasn’t a gun—it was a police badge! Oops. Honestly, I wasn’t sure which was worse. It was a cartoonishly comical moment as all of us who were a split second behind the quick-drawing comrade with the flagpole strike to the head turned away mid-movement like vampires who had just been flashed a cross. Not our finest “Let’s try to not antagonize the cops too much today” moment. But somehow, miraculously, without further consequence.
\n\nStill, seeing as how the Nazis were already inside, the area was full of cops, and it probably wasn’t a great strategy to whack cops over the head with blunt objects and then hang around to see what happened next, we decided that was probably our cue to move along. Our time around the library had also allowed some stragglers and unorganized groups to join the bloc. There were now closer to a hundred of us. We decided to march around the area looking for stray Nazis.
\n\n“What are those flags?” A friend from DC pointed to the end of the next block ahead of us. In the distance, we could see several flags, mostly bearing red and black colors. My comrade turned to one of the anti-fascists from Philadelphia: “Are we missing anybody?”
\n\n“I don’t think so, all the groups are accounted for. And if it were just individuals, there wouldn’t be that many and they wouldn’t have all those flags.”
\n\nAs we approached, we got a clearer look. They were not red and black flags, but rather red, black, and white…
\n\nThen the swastikas came into view.
\n\nAccording to the Barricada article, “Victory in York,”
\n\n\n\n\n“We had accidentally stumbled upon a parking lot full of Hammerskins. Almost immediately, the bloc broke out into a run in order to reach the thirty or forty Hammerskins before the police could rush in to save them. However, the few moments of hesitation were enough to allow the police to set up a dividing line between the Hammerskins and the anti-fascists.”
\n
Perhaps some of the US comrades were more accustomed to this, but for me, as a foreigner, it was a shocking sight. I had seen a swastika here or there in other countries, in photographs of clandestine Nazi shows or on some bonehead’s patch or tattoo. But since they are illegal throughout Europe and South America, I had never in my life witnessed a group of Nazis standing in the street with enormous swastika flags. They looked like real-life incarnations of the cartoon cliché of a Nazi bonehead, uniformly sporting shaved heads, bomber jackets, and steel-toed boots.
\n\nAs a militant anti-fascist with an intellectual understanding of the past horrors of fascism and the dangers that it currently poses, I have made fighting fascists a more or less central aspect of my adult life. But I am also the grandson of Jewish refugees from Germany. I grew up on the stories my grandfather told me about not being allowed to ride the train to school because he was not “Aryan,” about the yellow star he had to wear. His father, my own great grandfather, was a decorated German soldier who had been wounded in World War I. They were fully assimilated Germans first, Jewish second. My grandfather told me that his father, this veteran of war, could not bring himself to understand that “his” country would turn on them like that, that they were no longer “German” but “other,” just “Jews.” In 1937, after my grandfather received a particularly vicious beating from a group of Hitler Youth, my great grandfather finally decided to take his family to Paraguay.
\n\nSo my antifascism is practical and personal as well as intellectual. The sight of a swastika-waving mob standing smugly behind the shelter of a police line inspired a visceral rage that to this day I don’t feel I can adequately articulate.
\n\nBut as far as I could tell, we had reached an impasse. The police were between us, protecting the Nazis.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/01/11/5.jpg\")
The three forces on the streets of York on January 12, 2002: neo-Nazis, locals and anti-fascists intent on confronting them, and police determined to protect the Nazis so they could recruit with impunity.
\n“Hey, are you seeing all these people?!”
\n\nI turned to the person asking, a friend from the Midwest with whom I had shared more than a few scenes of combat with over the preceding year. Sometimes, you lose the forest for the trees; I had been staring at the swastika enthusiasts for the last hour or so, losing track of the rest of my surroundings. When I finally turned to look behind me, I saw a sight as surprising as it was inspiring. Whereas previously, we had been a group of less than one hundred black bloc anarchists, we were now part of a crowd of perhaps five hundred people. There were people of all ages—some white, but mostly Black and Latino/Latina. People in the neighborhood had heard what was going on and had come out to see for themselves.
\n\nShe and I started to mingle with the crowd. A lot of them were not sure what to make of the mob of weird kids in ski masks. We engaged in conversation where we could. Whether because she was a woman or simply because she was friendly and articulate, most people seemed to be more inclined to engage with her. For my part, I made a point of talking with those I heard speaking Spanish. From our interactions as well as from the snippets of conversations we caught among locals, it was clear that word was getting around to the effect that the people in black were the good guys and gals.
\n\n\n\n\n“Up the street, Louise McCarthy, a legal assistant, watched warily from her stoop. She thought the white supremacists should have met in the square—”out in the open”—instead of in the library. A passerby told McCarthy he hoped there wouldn’t be any trouble. McCarthy responded: “I hope (the protesters) beat the s— out of them.”
\n
Another conversation captured by the increasingly incredulous York Daily Record reporter went similarly: “That’s the good crowd. They’re going stand up to those people. I appreciate that.”
\n\nI don’t remember a single conversation or incident that day involving concerns about protecting the free speech of Nazis, or the idea that violence would make us just as bad as the Nazis, or any other liberal horseshoe-theory-of-extremism nonsense. This was a multi-racial working-class neighborhood and the mood was combative: Nazis out! That would have been enough to make for an inspiring experience, with the headline in next month’s Barricada declaring “Local Community and Anarchists Confront Nazis; Nazis Cower Behind Police Protection.” But it would have ended there, had it not been for the energy and initiative of the local youth.
\n\nIt’s important not to repeat white racist tropes depicting young people of color as inherently dangerous. Those pave the way for racist vigilantes to stalk and murder youth of color on the streets when they try to purchase Skittles or go jogging. At the same time, it’s fair to say that some of the young people who joined us that day were no strangers to violence.
\n\nAt first, there was a small group of five or ten. They started calling their friends, and before we knew it, a solid forty to fifty combative locals, mostly in their teens or early twenties, had gathered alongside us.
\n\nAs if on cue, either the Nazis or the cops decided it was time to go and they both began moving up the street and into an alleyway leading to the parking lot. This generated excitement and commotion, but there was still a solid police line separating us. The locals proposed a solution: “This way, this way! We can get into that alleyway from the other side!” We sprinted along behind them, a hundred people strong. Within seconds, we were face to face with the Nazis, who had no cops to protect them this time.
\n\nThe ensuing confrontation was intense. Boots, fists, and flagpoles flew in every direction. The police swiftly intervened, but not before several Nazis received bloody noses and someone on our side suffered a broken elbow.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/01/11/6.jpg\")
A neo-Nazi bloodied by anti-fascists in York, Pennsylvania on January 12, 2002, along with coverage of the day’s events from the New York Times.
\nAs we withdrew before the ensuing police charge, I saw my comrade stumble as a police officer caught up with him. It seemed to me that the officer had the upper hand—but at the last minute, my friend regained his footing and sped away.
\n\n“Dude, when we were on the ground, you know what that cop said to me? ‘Go, go, go, get out of here.’” Evidently, at least some of the cops had decided that we were the lesser of the two evils that day.
\n\nWe regrouped and got our bearings. We still numbered a good fifty or sixty. The Hammerskins were in the street, while the cops had pushed us back into the open-air parking lot… the parking lot full of the Nazis’ vehicles! If only they could see the grins beneath our ski masks. We began playing an energetic adaptation of“Where’s Waldo?”—Spot the Nazi’s car and remove the windows. The merry music of smashing glass resounded in the parking lot while the Nazis watched helplessly from the street.
\n\nFrom the Barricada article “Victory in York”:
\n\n\n\n\nEventually, the police decided to try to usher the Hammerskins out through the other side of the alley, halfway down the intersecting street. Once again, the local youths led the way at full speed and directed the out-of-town anti-fascists to the exact spot where the Nazis were to be found, once again, without police to defend them. Several dozen Hammerskins with swastika flags, and one in a white pickup truck, faced off against a significantly larger number of black bloc anarchists and local African-American and Latino youths. After instants of hesitation, during which all sorts of debris flew, the anti-fascists charged full speed into the Hammerskins who, in another display of “White Pride and Bravery,” retreated quickly behind police lines, losing a large swastika flag in the process.
\n
The confrontation was extremely violent and, for lack of a better word, intimate. The setting, an urban alleyway, had a kind of modern day West Side Story charm. We were in hand-to-hand combat. On both sides, you could see people nursing injuries, visibly bloodied, although the Nazis definitely got the worst of it.
\n\nI would be lying if I said that I feared for my safety at the time. I wasn’t thinking about any such thing. But there is a significant distinction between a confrontation with the repressive arm of the state and a confrontation with fascists. In a street confrontation, while a police officer will usually respond within certain parameters and protocols of engagement, this is not the case with fascists. If you are at a demonstration and push against a line of police, the chances are slim that one of them will pull out a knife and stab you in the heart. This is not the case with fascists, who can and will kill you.
\n\nBut the inverse is true, as well. When we engage in confrontations with police, because our tax dollars have paid for tons of expensive protective gear for them, the chances of inflicting serious injury are relatively slim. Moreover, at least in my case, my opposition to the cop is based on the mercenary role he plays perpetuating capitalism and the state. From my perspective, the individual cop is not necessarily a hateful villain. I am fighting what he is paid to defend, not necessarily him as an individual.
\n\nThis is not true of the fascist. As an individual, the fascist is my enemy. He is a bigot with ideas that are diametrically opposed to mine. His victory means danger and death to vulnerable, marginalized, and excluded communities and individuals. It means danger and death to me personally as a Jewish person. There is nothing ritualized or symbolic about our confrontations with fascists.
\n\nI take great pride in my role in standing up to violent racists, that day in York and elsewhere around the globe. In that clash, I became the proud owner of a swastika flag to go with my “White Man’s Bible.” Some Nazi tried to hit me with his flagpole, foolishly using the side with the flag on it as the business end of the weapon, and was promptly relieved of both flag and flagpole. If ever you must use a flagpole with a flag on it as a weapon, wrap the flag tight around it and strike with non-flag side towards your opponent.
\n\nBut ideally, don’t use flagpoles as weapons. Try to resolve your differences amicably. Violence is bad.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/01/11/2.jpg\")
Neo-Nazis and police officers, some of them on horseback, attack York locals responding to the invasion of their community on June 12, 2002.
\nWe live in a world that is structured around the threat of violence, implicit or explicit. It is not surprising that attempts to change the world often lead to violent confrontations. It should also not be surprising if these are necessary when it comes to opposing the adherents of genocidal ideologies.
\n\nWhich brings us to the next point that often comes up in regards to confrontations with Nazis—the issue of fear. Those who applauded what we did but who didn’t feel capable of doing it themselves sometimes described us as “brave.” I can’t speak for others, but in my case, this notion of “bravery” didn’t apply to me. I understand bravery as taking action despite fear. But whether because of my personality, my political fanaticism, or for some other reason, I felt no fear for my own well-being. Somehow, the idea that I could be significantly injured or even killed in a confrontation never crossed my mind, despite my having seen several comrades fall. In my eyes, I was simply taking my convictions to their natural—and to me obligatory—conclusion, using my body as a tool against fascists, state, and capital.
\n\nWhat happened next shocks me more today than it did back then, now that I am a little older and a lot more appreciative of the fragility of human life. And I can no longer think of York without thinking of Charlottesville and what happened to Heather Heyer.
\n\nWhether panicking or simply seizing the opportunity to murder people he considered less than human, the Nazi in the aforementioned white pickup truck hit the gas, driving into the crowd at full speed. As in Charlottesville, where people were penned in by the cars parked on both sides of the road, we were penned in the alleyway, with nothing but wall to either side of us. My comrades and I were fortunate enough to dodge the oncoming truck, but one anti-fascist was not. Incredibly, he suffered nothing more than a dislocated shoulder.
\n\nThe Nazi also struck a twelve-year-old local girl. She required hospitalization to treat her injuries, but miraculously, she escaped permanent physical injury.
\n\nFrom an anonymous street medic’s eyewitness account:
\n\n\n\n\nThen I heard somebody scream, “MEDIC!” I went back into the insanity behind me to find that a girl around I would assume was 10-14 years old had been sideswiped by the truck that had minutes before been driven through the crowd. Another medic on the scene was doing what little she could for the girl, such as keeping her calm and treating for shock, as I dialed 911 on my cell phone. I was put through to the dispatcher and requested EMT backup and an ambulance. Waiting for the ambulance to arrive, we were approached by around 20 riot cops who proceeded to harass us, asking us what we were doing there. We told them that we were medics, but they continued to harass us. An unidentified woman who knew the girl who was hit (I don’t know if the woman was her mother or aunt or just a friend) was standing up against a building behind the injured girl, screaming at the police, asking how they could let this happen. The ambulance then drove up and a medic got out and began to check the injured girl. The cops grabbed the screaming woman as the medic was working on the girl and the cops started a fight right over the girl who had been hit by the truck. As the woman fought back, several black bloc members rushed the cops and attempted to pull them off. One of the black bloc members in a valiant attempt to free the woman tackled a cop and was then grabbed by three other riot officers. As they pinned him down and got the cuffs out, the cops were hit again, and the bloc member was yanked up and flung into the crowd and disappeared. Watching this, it was then that I noticed the ambulance fleeing the scene. Everyone was screaming at them because they left the girl at the scene.
\n
Imagine if that little girl had been killed. Obviously, a rational analysis would have us conclude that the responsibility lay squarely with the homicidal Nazi who saw a bunch of anarchists and a young Black girl and decided to treat them like bowling pins. But to what extent would we have been indirectly responsible for contributing to the situation?
\n\nThe Nazi’s truck stalled about half a block down the road. Once again, people attacked him. He lost all his windows, and then as he continued trying to flee he struck both a police officer and his vehicle. The cop gave him quite a beating before proceeding to arrest him. (Baltimore Nazi Richard Desper’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day ended with four counts of aggravated assault and one count of reckless driving.)
\n\nThat was the point at which things started to get insane. The cops completely lost control of the situation, as several groups of ten to twenty people hunted Nazis around the city as they tried to make their escape.
\n\nOur group quickly encountered yet another white pickup truck (apparently the racists’ vehicle of choice) with a bonehead girl wearing a Skrewdriver scarf standing by it. Skrewdriver was the band led by the late Ian Stuart, who rose to international fame among racist youth thanks to catchy and poetic masterpieces such as “White Power,” “White Warriors,” “Race and Nation,” and “Blood and Honor” In 1993, Mr. Stuart was fatally attacked by a tree while driving, in yet another heinous act of anti-white racism.
\n\nOne of us unsuccessfully attempted to relieve her of her scarf. She scrambled into the passenger’s side of the truck. A flagpole came crashing down on her hand as she closed the door. The driver sped away, but stopped less than half a block away.
\n\nAgain, all the windows were smashed. One of the local kids grabbed the driver with both hands and tried to pull him out the window of the truck. Failing that, he proceeded to strike him repeatedly. I moved around to the passenger side, thrusting half my body through the window. And this is where I probably should have died.
\n\nThe next image in my mind is that of a handgun pressed firmly against my masked forehead. The driver had recovered and was looking straight at me while pressing the gun against my face. In that moment, my only reaction was to call out “Gun!” in order to give my comrades fair warning. I pushed myself back out of the cab, then proceeded to attack again, but from the rear window, trying to stay out of view and ideally out of the way of a possible shot. Somehow, the idea that I was in potentially mortal danger didn’t even cross my mind, although I reflected that the comrade who had worn a bulletproof vest might not have been overprepared after all. Aside from that, the incident did nothing to make us think that “Hey, maybe that was enough for today.”
\n\nOn the contrary. We continued ambushing cars and trucks full of racists around the city. The only explanation I can come up with as to why neither I nor any of my comrades were shot that day is that the racist right have gained confidence and combativeness over the two decades since.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/01/11/1.jpg\")
Anti-fascists attack neo-Nazis driving a truck in York, Pennsylvania on January 12, 2002.
\nAfter the gun incident, our next encounter was with a van full of World Church of the Creator “White Berets,” the so-called defense forces of the WCOTC. They briefly exited the vehicle as if to confront us, then jumped right back in and sped off as the van’s windshield caved in. I can’t possibly imagine that these people were not armed, yet they didn’t even brandish a firearm as a dissuasive measure.
\n\nThe Nazis we fought at York were representatives of the largest and most violent fascist organizations of that time. To us, York was a momentous battle. A gathering of well over a hundred Nazis in the Northeast was an exceptional and worrying event, but it ended with them being run out of the city.
\n\nYet when I look at footage from Charlottesville, I can’t avoid the conclusion that our enemy at York was almost harmless compared to the fascists who gathered in Charlottesville in 2017. I’ve been involved in anti-fascism for over twenty years and on three continents, including a ten-year stint in Germany where there are indeed a large number of fascists. But what I saw in Charlottesville terrified me.
\n\nBesides the issue of numbers—as the gathering in Charlottesville was significantly larger than the one in York—the main distinction is in the confidence of the fascists and how common it has become among them not only to brandish firearms, but also to use them offensively. Their movement has normalized the mass murder of those who don’t fit into their vision of a white ethno-state—not just as fantasy, but in tangible acts, as evidenced by the regularity of white supremacist killing sprees, now indubitably the most significant “domestic terror” threat in the United States.
\n\nIn the decade and a half between the fascist rallies in York and Charlottesville, fascists successfully regrouped and rebranded, emboldened beyond their wildest dreams by the political developments of those years—including a president who acted as their cheerleader-in-chief.
\n\nThe white supremacist lunatic fringe of the 1990s and early 2000s seems to have effectively merged with the much larger and politically powerful movement of “white grievance.” White grievance and the conscious or subconscious defense of whiteness as a dominant force in society was the driving force behind Trump’s appeal. Capitalism has exacerbated this, as declining economic conditions leave white workers more susceptible to a reactionary analysis, and the failure of the “left” to fill that void doesn’t help. But the experience of racial privilege and the fear of losing it remains a driving force in the reactionary drift in US society.
\n\nOrganized white supremacists have been effectively harnessing that sentiment and positioning themselves as faithful vanguard of Trumpism. They may be relatively few in number, but they are filling several key roles. They are its shock troops on the streets—but just as significantly, they are the main driving force behind attempts to normalize the racist attitudes that had begun to shift to the margins of society thanks to decades of anti-racist struggle. The backlash against “political correctness” represents an attempt to re-legitimize racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and reactionary attitudes and language that had been successfully marginalized through decades of struggle.
\n\nI don’t have a particular solution to propose. Far from it. I hated the “veteran of battles past gives lessons to youth” speeches when old-timers subjected us to them. If anything, I would simply make a broad argument for the continued urgency and necessity of militant anti-fascism on all fronts. I would also encourage and applaud efforts to improve our training and capacity for collective defense, so that we can deny the fascists any easy victories and keep ourselves safe at the same time. As a comrade pointed out to me after York, “We may be the good guys, but we aren’t bulletproof.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/01/11/7.jpg\")
Anarchists in York, January 12, 2002. Members of the Anti-Racist Action chapter in Aurora, Illinois made business cards featuring this photograph.
\nWe drove away from York that day feeling powerful, happy, and emboldened. It didn’t hurt that we had a nine-hour drive during which to rehash every detail of what we had just experienced.
\n\nThe Nazis had attempted a show of force. Instead, they had sustained several injuries, lost several flags, had their vehicles smashed, and been chased out of town. This wasn’t exactly new—something similar had happened to them in Wallingford, Connecticut and Peoria, Illinois. But it felt important to us at that moment.
\n\nIn the United States, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, we were increasingly isolated against the growing chorus of people claiming “now is not the time for militance”—be they reformists claiming that protest was somehow disrespectful or former allies calling for a supposedly strategic withdrawal from the streets. In Barricada, we kept proclaiming that this was no time to stop being combative, and we felt an obligation to lead by example. Our mobilization in York was already our second successful act of mass militance in the post-9/11 times. We had sustained a relatively low number of arrests and injuries. We were starting to believe that “just keep pushing no matter how hard the prevailing headwinds might be” wasn’t just the strategy that most appealed to our youthful enthusiasm and fanaticism, but might also be the correct approach.
\n\nThat night, we felt great enthusiasm and optimism. Yet writing enthusiastically about anti-fascist victories is difficult today, when a lot of those same fascists and their ideas have now entered the mainstream. It is difficult to reconcile the idea that we acted correctly, both in terms of political analysis and tactics, with a reality in which racist and fascist movements are exponentially stronger than they were twenty years ago. Perhaps we must consider the possibility that we can give our very best, both analytically and tactically, yet still be defeated by historical forces much greater than ourselves. If there is any lesson from history that anarchists should be painfully aware of, it is and that a just idea or cause can be defeated, temporarily or permanently, for a variety of reasons.
\n\nI won’t attempt to analyze how racist and nationalist ideas have gained so much traction in the mainstream of society in the US and Europe. Does rainbow capitalism foment an identitarian reactionary backlash? Probably, as a “socially progressive” but economically reactionary society necessarily creates disenfranchised groups who will look for scapegoats and find them in the foreign worker or the darker-skinned neighbor. It is precisely for this reason that revolutionary anti-fascists have always insisted that there is no effective anti-fascist analysis without a critique of capitalism. Should we have focused more on the suit-and-tie fascists, on the racist and totalitarian ideas seeping into the mainstream of society, instead of on the marginal clowns waving swastika flags? I’m tempted to say so, but I suspect that this wouldn’t be fair to the anti-fascist struggles around Europe and the US in those days. It was and is right to confront fascists militantly as a matter of community self-defense. In France in the 1990s, we were already warning against the “lepenization des esprits,” which translates roughly to the “Le Penization of the mind” (Jean-Marie Le Pen being the leader of the far-right French National Front at that time). In the United States, militant anti-fascism has always gone hand in hand with a critique of systemic and institutionalized racism.
\n\nThe victory in York was significant because it showcased the tremendous potential of spontaneous and organic cooperation between militant anti-fascists from around the region and local Black and Brown youth. Had it not been for them identifying us as allies and trusting us enough to fight beside us, January 12 would have ended in a forgettable standoff. Instead, their initiative and familiarity with the terrain carried the day. Aside from the fact that we had not conducted much outreach ahead of time, the events in York represented a glimpse of what engagement with local communities could look like when we communicated and acted in ways that potential allies could identify with, addressing issues that were relevant to their daily lives.
\n\nI’ll let the pages of a 2002 issue of Barricada speak for themselves:
\n\n\n\n\n…even more inspiring than the tactical victory of York for the anti-racist movement, are the political ramifications that the action has had. By working on a street level with the local working-class youth, and people of color of all ages, we have made important connections with people who generally fall outside of our demographic. In showing that we can put words into action, that we are willing to put ourselves on the line to stop neo-Nazis from rallying, and that we will use violence to drive them out, we have successfully legitimized ourselves in the eyes of these communities.
\n\nIn doing so, we have opened the door to further dialogue and cooperation between us. Already, some comrades have discussed having our own anti-racist public meeting in York to help develop these ties. This is exactly what we should be doing now, and any means of facilitating greater connection between ourselves as anti-racists and as revolutionaries and the Black and Latino communities of York should be pursued. Now that we have proven ourselves militant anti-racists, we should seek to expand the debate around racism within York to include an analysis of systemic and institutional forms of racism and propose our own revolutionary anarchist solutions to them. However, the established order is seeking to co-opt our own militant anti-racism with their MTV-style “anti-racism,” which only serves to conceal the real sources of systemic discrimination and racism. We cannot allow our victory to end in a gain for neo-liberalism.
\n\nIt is heartening to note that it was the working-class youth of York themselves who took the lead in attacking the neo-Nazis, and it was the anti-racist and anarchist activists who followed them, both physically and tactically. By rejecting a leadership role, and acting only as instigators of the street protest, the activists present allowed the situation to become intensely empowering for the locals in the streets, rather than hinder it as has been done at so many large protests in the last two years. While this is attributable only to the people of York, we should seek to replicate this in the future, if possible, by refusing to impose our own tactical decisions upon locals who join us in the streets.
\n\nSince the development of the “anti-globalization movement,” there has been a raging debate over why there is not greater participation from working-class communities in either that movement or revolutionary struggles in general in the United States. York, along with the Cincinnati rebellion last year, seem to go a long way in explaining this phenomenon. Clearly, people of color are not reluctant to engage in militant action and risk arrest, as many have claimed in the past, simply because they face higher risk of punishment than white youths. It seems painfully obvious now that when confronted with an issue that directly affects them, as the people of York were when neo-Nazis invaded their city, these communities are often the most militant and passionate about total resistance. In dealing with neo-Nazis, it is not likely that we will need to explain to anyone why they pose a threat to their safety; however, the lesson remains true to all political work we do: if working class people do not directly relate to the issue at hand, then they will not be inspired to fight in large numbers against it.
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/01/11/3.jpg\")
\nIt is becoming widely understood that the shot callers in the Democratic Party have no intention to stick their necks out to preserve abortion access. For the most cynical of the Democratic politicians, the overturning of Roe v. Wade represents an opportunity to improve their job security by the changing the subject back to electoral politics once again. Yet a coherent grassroots strategy for resisting the criminalization of abortion has yet to emerge. Let’s talk about what such a strategy might entail.
\n\nThis is especially pressing as today’s Supreme Court is not finished reshaping the legal landscape. They may continue to hand down decisions like the overturning of Roe v. Wade for years or even decades to come.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/27/1.jpg\")
\nIntentionally or unintentionally, the leak of the Supreme Court ruling may have functioned to defuse resistance rather than to catalyze it. It gave the general public a chance to get used to the bad news before it was confirmed, ensuring that people who might otherwise have been shocked into action behaved in more predictable ways. Liberal organizations took advantage of the advance warning to organize rallies channeling people’s rage and heartbreak into largely symbolic actions, but there was no comparable effort to coordinate an offensive participatory strategy based in direct action.
\n\nWhat follows is a tentative effort to talk strategy as we embark on the next chapter of a centuries-long struggle. What can direct action offer the fight for reproductive freedom?
\n\nFirst, there are some things that you can accomplish by acting on your own without waiting for anyone else. If you want the wall down the street to express support for people who need abortion access, grab some spray-paint and go out tonight. Likewise, you can stockpile abortion pills and get them to those who need them along with information about how to use them.
\n\nSecond, there are many ways to extend support to those who will be most impacted by the criminalization of abortion. One of the most fundamental effects of the banning of abortion in half of the United States will be that millions of people who did not previously consider themselves radicals will experience the courts, the laws, and the police as their enemies in an immediate, visceral way. While this may legitimize illegal activity for some who previously had a superstitious faith in the rule of law, it will also have consequences similar to the impact of the laws criminalizing marijuana: in anti-choice states, the wealthy and privileged will be able to access abortion easily enough, while poor people from targeted demographics will suffer egregiously. Drawing on the examples of No More Deaths and similar solidarity projects, we should not underestimate the tremendous amount of effort this kind of organizing will require, nor how difficult it will be to get support to those who need it most. This work is crucial, but is essentially defensive in character.
\n\nFinally, movements can use direct action to exert leverage within society, including on those who aim to criminalize abortion. This is what we mean by an offensive strategy: in addition to responding to the negative consequences of the Supreme Court verdict, taking steps to push back against it.
\n\nIn order to use direct action to exert leverage in this way, you have to:
\n\nThe person or group you focus on could be the ones responsible for the injustice you seek to address, or they might have no direct connection to the injustice but be positioned in such a way that they could do something to stop it. The action you take need not be adversarial—it could be as simple as serving delicious food at a demonstration to ensure that people show up who might not otherwise attend.
\n\nTo offer another example: if opponents of abortion access sincerely wished to diminish the total number of abortions in the United States, they would focus on providing resources and community support to everyone who might become pregnant, so that no one would feel that they are too poor or too isolated to be able to raise a child. That would be the only surefire way to diminish the number of both legal and illegal abortions. The fact that, instead, the anti-choice movement has focused almost exclusively on legislation shows that in fact, their actual goal is to impose patriarchal control over people’s bodies by means of state violence.
\n\nIt’s important to spell this out: if your goal is to exert leverage, you have to identify a group you can actually exert leverage on—a group that is likely to change course as a consequence of your intervention. If there are no circumstances under which those you are seeking to influence would make a different decision, or if they have already made their decision, it might make sense to focus your efforts elsewhere. You have to make sure that the target of your efforts has a choice—then make them an offer they can’t refuse.
\n\nRight now, the basic strategic problem is that no one has fleshed out a proposal to make suppressing abortion access the least desirable choice for the Republicans or their centrist accomplices. The Republicans are getting what they want: the more that their efforts to criminalize abortion outrage and harm people, the better, as wielding power over others’ lives is precisely what energizes their base. But Democratic politicians also have no great incentive to take risks to defend abortion access. Though Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others have proposed a strategy to codify abortion rights into law, most Democrats are determined to sit on their hands, hoping that this issue will help them in the midterm elections—regardless of the risks that those who are being criminalized face today.
\n\nThis is consistent with Democrats’ efforts to re-legitimize the police and other institutions of the state in the wake of the 2020 uprising—and to do so even as Republicans are poised to gain control of those institutions and keep control of them by coup if necessary. These are the workings of the political ratchet, in which Republicans continuously push state institutions towards more oppressive agendas while Democrats continuously give ground, keeping those who are suffering invested in the state itself in hopes that it might one day be reformed. If the same pattern plays out in regards to abortion access, there really is no hope other than direct action.
\n\nThe good news is that if someone can demonstrate a strategy to effectively exert leverage on those who are responsible for suppressing abortion access, countless people will want to participate in it. People may come out to march in circles and listen to speakers a couple times a year, but if they see that there is something meaningful that they can do to effect change directly, they will show up with vigor and enthusiasm. We saw this most recently in summer 2020.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/27/2.jpg\")
Graffiti in Portland, Oregon.
\nWhat strategies have demonstrators experimented with thus far that might offer meaningful leverage on those who are complicit in suppressing abortion access?
\n\nIt is a classic historical pattern that, after the cooptation and repression of a movement like the George Floyd uprising of 2020, some participants revert to staid, legalistic marches while others attempt to continue escalating on their own, shifting to invite-only night actions for the sake of security. This perfectly describes the dichotomy between this past weekend’s sign-holding rallies and the vandalism that various anonymous groups have carried out under the umbrella of the Jane’s Revenge model. The public rallies are eminently accessible, but offer little meaningful engagement; the invite-only night actions may inspire people to take action on their own, but do not offer a participatory space in which to build collective momentum. Something is needed to fill in the space between these two poles.
\n\nLikewise, whatever their other virtues, both of these models fall short when we evaluate them as means of exerting leverage. The target of the public rallies is vague: in addressing society at large by means of a largely symbolic event, they might even reassure those who are criminalizing abortion that there will be no real consequences for doing so. Their chief value is probably in bolstering the morale of the participants. By contrast, the targets of the Jane’s Revenge actions are very specific—but in targeting anti-abortion centers, they are taking on the most intransigent opponents of abortion, people who have dedicated their lives to fighting against abortion access, many of whom consider themselves to be carrying out the will of God. In attempting to exert leverage on such people, one could end up locked in a private grudge match, missing the opportunity to open up expansive spaces of struggle that can draw in more participants while escalating.
\n\nSomewhere between the public rallies and the invite-only night actions, we find the most promising events of this past weekend—breakaway marches that blocked highways in Los Angeles and other cities, on the one hand, and demonstrations outside the homes of the Supreme Court justices, on the other. These have the virtue of being both participatory and confrontational. Again, however, when it comes to exerting leverage, the target of the street marches and freeway blockades is a little bit abstract, whereas the Supreme Court justices are unlikely to change their minds, even if they have to get a bigger security detail.
\n\nIf it is possible to exert leverage on anyone who is complicit in criminalizing abortion, it is probably not far-right religious cult members, but their centrist accomplices. Presented with the choice between risking their careers and sacrificing the abortion access of millions of the desperately poor, centrist politicians will usually choose the latter—but it might be possible to revise those options in such a way that they would be compelled to think twice.
\n\nAt the high point of the George Floyd uprising, when millions of people had ceased to accept the legitimacy of the police and were acting accordingly, we saw terrified liberals like the mayor of Minneapolis suddenly take the demands of the movement very seriously, promising to take steps towards police abolition (which the movement had already made a reality to some extent). Later, when the politicians had reestablished control, they betrayed those promises—showing that our effectiveness hinges on keeping our social movements lively and strong, not on winning concessions. If demonstrators could find an effective and infectious way to express a total rejection of the court system, that might bring about a similar situation.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/TaylorKinnerup/status/1540542346332217344/photo/1\n\n\n
In the past, pressure campaigns have targeted the American Legislative Exchange Council and similar organizations to some effect. In liberal urban centers in the states that are criminalizing abortion, there is another potential point of intervention: some district attorneys are already declaring that they won’t prosecute abortion cases. This could represent a precedent that other prosecutors could be pressed to adopt, widening fault lines within the legal system in those states.
\n\nThe movement against racist police murders that eventually led to the George Floyd uprising got off the ground in the first place because, starting with the protests against the murder of Oscar Grant in 2009, the participants were able to connect the following crucial elements:
\n\nOther movements—the environmental movement, for example—have not been establish this connection between analysis, action, and context, and have subsequently remained stunted (with exceptions, thankfully). If we want to mobilize an effective resistance to the criminalization of abortion, we have to learn from the George Floyd uprising.
\n\nYes, there are fundamental differences between the movement for reproductive freedom and the movement for Black lives—but those who will be most impacted by the criminalization of abortion overlap considerably with those who are most impacted by racist policing. Although the politics of the movement for reproductive freedom are currently more liberal and reformist, correlating with the higher profile that middle-class organizers have in its ranks, that could change as the situation intensifies. We should remember that in the years between the 2001 uprising in Cincinnati and the rebellion mourning Oscar Grant, movements against police violence often seemed easily co-opted, as well.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ChuckModi1/status/1540518402975997952\n\n\n
As anarchists, we don’t look to the Supreme Court to defend our freedoms from other courts and state institutions. We don’t believe that any court or state institution possesses inherent legitimacy. That being said, in a struggle for our freedom and well-being that pits us against courts, cops, and other state institutions, compelling one such institution to limit the power of another can be strategic, provided it does not contribute to legitimizing any of the institutions involved. It must be clear to everyone that the power that drives social change derives from grassroots organizing, not from state institutions—that it is the needs and desires and autonomy of the human beings involved that are legitimate, not the structures that purport to represent them.
\n\nThe fact that some US courts recognize abortion rights at all is itself the result of decades of grassroots struggle. Today, a majority of residents of the United States support some kind of abortion access, but this was not always the case.
\n\nSupport for abortion access has slowly risen since the 1970s, even as the number of abortions people seek has declined since 1980. In 1978, only a third of those polled in the United States supported abortion access unconditionally; by 2018, that had risen to slightly over half. As Moxie Marlinspike argues in “We Should All Have Something to Hide,” it is difficult for most people to grasp the value of something that is illegal and therefore unfamiliar; the first step towards social change is for a powerful movement to persistently demonstrate its value in defiance of the law.
\n\nThe Roe v. Wade decision did not take place because a majority of the US population supported abortion access in 1973. Rather, in view of organizing efforts such as the Jane collective, which provided an estimated 11,000 illegal abortions, we can conclude that the ruling was a response to the intensity with which a particular segment of the population was fighting for abortion access, and to their success in calling the state’s monopoly on power into question by continuing to make abortion available despite the efforts of police and judges.
\n\nSmall groups that win concessions as a consequence of their intensity and successful defiance can enable the rest of society to discover the advantages of something that is currently illegal. Such groups are responsible for the better part of social progress; they initiated the process that ultimately led to the legalization of marijuana in parts of the United States, for example. Of all of the struggles that reached a high point in 2020, some of the most unambiguous victories were the statue topplings: governments that never would have taken action to remove racist statues were also not prepared to reinstall them once autonomous crowds illegally toppled them.
\n\nArguably, two of the most common justifications for the power of the Supreme Court and other state institutions are, first, that they represent the will of the majority, and, second, that they maintain historical legal precedents. As anarchists, we don’t believe that either of these justifications is as important as people’s own judgments about what contributes to their personal well-being. But it is noteworthy that, in striking down Roe v. Wade, the majority of the Supreme Court is neither enforcing the will of the majority nor maintaining historical legal precedents—certainly not precedents that have prevailed for the vast majority of our lives. Rather, the Supreme Court is implementing a decades-old program propelled by the intensity and defiance of far-right anti-choice activists—who used assassinations and bombings, among other tactics, to build a pressure campaign comprised of many interlocking fronts.
\n\nThe far right are also advocates of social change—but towards a more repressive, authoritarian, sexist, racist, and homophobic society. Where anarchist direct action generally targets the most powerful and privileged, the far right pursue policies that generally target the desperate and downtrodden. Where anarchists seek to decentralize power and access to resources, the far right seeks to use the state to preserve disparities. It remains to be seen how well doubling down on state violence as the chief means of enacting their program will work out for them in an era when faith in the state itself is eroding across the entire political spectrum.
\n\nThis struggle is not really about the Constitution or the number of judges on Supreme Court. No cabal of nine people deserves to wield sovereignty over the most intimate aspects of our lives, and adding two Democrats to the court wouldn’t change that. Likewise, we shouldn’t tie the hands of future rebels by focusing too much on the fact that the Supreme Court is not implementing the will of the majority in this case—the issue, rather, is that they are not entitled to rule us in the first place.
\n\nThe Supreme Court decision is not a matter of interpreting law; it is an act of war. Most of the players on all sides understand this as a power struggle over the bodily autonomy of those who can give birth, and are using whatever tools and reasoning are available to advance their respective agendas. Politicians are generally more cynical in the ways they relate to the state than those who explicitly reject the state itself.
\n\nAll the more reason for us to come up with strategies that we can enact together, without depending on any politician or party.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/06/27/3.jpg\")
Demonstrators participating in International Women’s Day in Mexico City on March 8, 2022.
\nWe’ve prepared a poster and a selection of other resources in response to the news that the Supreme Court is poised to give a green light to government agencies to take away the reproductive freedoms of tens of millions of people.
\n\nYou can find an array of useful information about how to gain or support access to abortion in each state here.
\nYou can find information about self-managed abortion using abortion pills here and information about how to access abortion pills online here.
\nSister Song is an organization that focuses on reproductive freedom for Indigenous people and people of color. Statistics suggest that these demographics account for two-thirds of those who seek legal abortion. Thanks to structural white supremacy in the distribution of resources in the United States, these demographics will be the hardest hit by restrictions.
\nAbortion Care Network offers a support network for independent community-based abortion providers.
\n“Bodily Autonomy in the Streets“—A handout to distribute at demonstrations demanding abortion access, opposing top-down control of street actions.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/05/03/hands-off_digital.jpg\")
\nThis catastrophe compels us to confront the law itself as something hostile to us. If you are a person who might ever need an abortion—or if you care about a person who might—or if you believe that people deserve bodily self-determination, the state is your enemy. This system has given a handful of individuals, including at least two unrepentant sexual predators, the power to block abortion access to millions of people across the country. This is consistent with the explicitly misogynist and anti-trans agenda of the Republican Party and the systematic complicity of the Democratic Party.
\n\n\n\n\nAs anarchists, we reject the idea that judges or politicians deserve the authority to determine the course of our lives. Rather than only trying to pressure leaders to vote one way or the other in a winner-take-all system that reduces us to spectators in the decisions that affect us, we propose solutions based in direct action: taking power back into our hands by enacting our needs and solving our problems ourselves, without representatives.
\n\nAs long as legislators and judges can determine the scope of our reproductive options, our bodies and lives will be subject to the shifting winds of politics rather than our own immediate needs and values. Instead of validating their authority by limiting ourselves to calling for better legislators and judges, we should organize to secure and defend the means to make decisions regarding what we do with our bodies regardless of what courts or legislators decree.
\n\nIn practice, this could mean networking with health workers who have the necessary skills, and sharing them widely; stockpiling and manufacturing the supplies we need for all sorts of health care; defending spaces where we can operate our own clinics; fundraising resources to secure access to health care and birth control options for all, regardless of ability to pay; and developing models for reproductive autonomy that draw on past precedents but address our current problems. We can do our best to render the decisions of would-be patriarchs like Kavanaugh irrelevant.
\n\nAll this has already happened before. For example, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, the Jane network, a vast clandestine effort centered in Chicago, provided illegal abortions to thousands of women. The fact that abortion was already accessible to so many women was a major factor in compelling the US court system to finally legalize abortion access in order to be able to regulate it. The most effective way to pressure the authorities to permit us access to the resources and care that we need is to present them with a fait accompli. Unfortunately, when it comes to standing up to elites like the Supreme Court and the police who enforce its decisions, there are no shortcuts.
\n\n-Kavanaugh Shouldn’t Be on the Supreme Court—Neither Should Anyone Else
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/05/03/hands-off_front.jpg\")
Click on the image to access the poster PDF.
\nWith the Anti-Authoritarian Movement Athens and Nosotros EKX, we co-hosted a video presentation in which anarchist organizers from Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia speak about how people are experiencing and resisting the invasion in each of those countries, and what solidarity could look like elsewhere around the world.
\n\nThe presentation itself begins at 3:30, after a classic song from the Spanish Civil War, performed by The Ex.
\nThe speakers include Salem in Kyiv, a libertarian socialist and a founder of Operation Solidarity; Yana, a Russian anarchist and a participant in the support campaign for the targets of the Network Case, an entrapment operation carried out by the FSB, the Russian secret police; and Ivan Taratuta of the Anarchist Black Cross in Belarus.
\n\nDonate here to OVD-info, an independent news source about protest movements in Russia.
\n\nDonate via Paypal to the Anarchist Black Cross in Moscow: abc-msk@riseup.net
\n\nDonate via Paypal to the Anarchist Black Cross in Belarus: belarus_abc@riseup.net
\n\nFor anti-authoritarian news sources in Russia, start with avtonom.org. You can also consult the Anarchist Militant website. Meduza and \nOpen Democracy offer coverage of post-Soviet policy in Russia, as well.
\n\nAs of July 5, 2022, Operation Solidarity has suspended operations and is directing people to other projects, as you can read about here.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1497125965415256064\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2022/03/07/war-in-ukraine-ten-lessons-from-syria-syrian-exiles-on-how-their-experience-can-inform-resistance-to-the-invasion", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2022/03/07/war-in-ukraine-ten-lessons-from-syria-syrian-exiles-on-how-their-experience-can-inform-resistance-to-the-invasion", "title": "War in Ukraine: Ten Lessons from Syria : Syrian Exiles on How Their Experience Can Inform Resistance to the Invasion", "summary": "Syrian exiles reflect on how their experience in the Syrian Revolution can inform international solidarity against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. ", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/07/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/07/header.jpg", "date_published": "2022-03-07T12:41:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:53Z", "tags": [ "Syria", "Ukraine", "fascism", "anti-fascism", "imperialism", "anti-imperialism", "nato", "Russia" ], "content_html": "
In March 2011, protests broke out in Syria against the dictator Bashar al-Assad. Assad turned the full power of the military against the ensuing revolutionary movement; yet for some time, it appeared possible that it might topple his government. Then Vladimir Putin stepped in, enabling Assad to stay in power at a tremendous cost in human lives and securing a foothold for Russian power in the region. In the following text, a collective of Syrian exiles and their comrades think through how their experiences in the Syrian Revolution can inform efforts to support the resistance to the invasion in Ukraine and the anti-war movement in Russia.
\n\nSo much attention has been focused on Ukraine and Russia this past month that it is easy to lose track of the global context of these events. The following text offers a valuable reflection on imperialism, international solidarity, and understanding the nuances of complex and contradictory struggles.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/07/2.jpg\")
Portraits of Putin and Assad look on as armed soldiers patrol the ruins of Syria.
\nWe know it can be difficult to position yourself at a time like this. Between the ideological unanimity of the mainstream media and voices that unscrupulously relay Kremlin propaganda, it can be hard to know who to listen to. Between a NATO with dirty hands and a villainous Russian regime, we no longer know who to fight, who to support.
\n\nAs participants in and friends of the Syrian revolution, we want to defend a third option, offering a point of view based on the lessons of more than ten years of uprising and war in Syria.
\n\nLet us make this clear from the beginning: today, we still defend the revolt in Syria in all the ways that it was a popular, democratic, and emancipatory uprising, especially the coordination committees and the local councils of the revolution. While many have forgotten all this, we maintain that neither Bashar al-Assad’s atrocities and propaganda nor those of the jihadists can silence this voice.
\n\nIn what follows, we do not intend to compare what is happening in Syria and Ukraine. If these two wars both began with a revolution, and if one of the aggressors is the same, the situations remain very different. Rather, drawing on what we have learned from the revolution in Syria and then from the war that followed, we hope to offer some starting points to assist those who sincerely espouse emancipatory principles in figuring out how to take a stand.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/07/4.jpg\")
A banner in the Syrian town of Kafranbel. For a note on the flags displayed in this photograph, consult the appendix, below.
\nRather than experts in geopolitics, we should listen to the voices of those who have lived through the revolution in 2014 and lived through the war; we should listen to those who have suffered under Putin’s rule in Russia and elsewhere for twenty years. We invite you to favor the voices of people and organizations that defend the principles of direct democracy, feminism, and egalitarianism from that context. Understanding their position in Ukraine and their demands to those outside it will help you to arrive at an informed opinion of your own.
\n\nTaking this approach to Syria would have elevated—and perhaps supported—the impressive and promising experiments in self-organization that flourished across the country. Moreover, listening to the voices coming from Ukraine reminds us that all these tensions started with the Maidan uprising. However imperfect or “impure” it may be, let’s not make the mistake of reducing the popular Ukrainian uprising to a conflict of interests between great powers, the way some people intentionally did to obscure the Syrian revolution.
\n\nCertainly, it’s desirable to understand the economic, diplomatic, and military interests of the great powers; yet contenting yourself with an abstract geopolitical framing of the situation can leave you with an abstract, disconnected understanding of the terrain. This way of understanding tends to conceal the ordinary protagonists of the conflict, those who resemble us, those with whom we can identify. Above all, let’s not forget: what will happen is that people will suffer because of the choices of rulers who see the world as a chessboard, as a reservoir of resources to be plundered. This is the way that oppressors see the world. It should never be adopted by peoples, who should focus on building bridges between them, on finding common interests.
\n\nThis does not mean that we should neglect strategy, but it means strategizing on our own terms, at a scale on which we can take action ourselves—not to debate about whether to move tank divisions or cut gas imports. See our concrete proposals at the end of the article for more.
\n\nLet’s be clear—though hardly ideal, the reception of Syrian refugees in Europe was often more welcoming than the reception offered to refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, for example. Images of Black refugees turned away at the Ukraine-Poland border and comments in the corporate media privileging the arrival of “high quality” Ukrainian refugees over Syrian barbarians are proof of an increasingly uninhibited European racism. We defend an unconditional welcome for Ukrainians fleeing the horrors of war, but we refuse any hierarchy between refugees.
\n\nIf, as in Syria, they pretend to espouse a humanist and progressive agenda, most of these outlets tend to limit themselves to a victimizing and depoliticizing portrayal of the Ukrainians on the ground and in exile. They will only be given the opportunity to talk about individual cases, people fleeing, fear of bombs, and so on. This hinders viewers from understanding Ukrainians as full-fledged political actors capable of expressing opinions or political analysis regarding the situation in their own country. Moreover, such outlets tend to promote a crudely pro-Western position without nuance, historical depth, or inquiry into the driving interests of Western governments, which are presented as defenders of goodness, freedom, and an idealized liberal democracy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/07/3.jpg\")
Another photograph from Kafranbel.
\nEven if they are not directly invading Ukraine, let us not be naïve about NATO and Western countries. We must refuse to present them as the defenders of the “free world.” Remember, the West has built its power on colonialism, imperialism, oppression, and the plundering of the wealth of hundreds of peoples around the world—and it continues all of these processes today.
\n\nTo speak only of the 21st century, we do not forget the disasters inflicted by the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. More recently, during the Arab revolutions of 2011, instead of supporting the democratic and progressive currents, the West was mainly concerned with maintaining its domination and its economic interests. At the same time, it continues to sell arms to and maintain privileged relations with Arab dictatorships and Gulf monarchies. With its intervention in Libya, France added the shameful lie of a war for economic reasons disguised as an effort to support the fight for democracy.
\n\nIn addition to this international role, the situation within these countries continues to deteriorate as authoritarianism, surveillance, inequality, and above all racism continue to intensify.
\n\nToday, if we believe that Putin’s regime represents a greater threat to the self-determination of peoples, it is not because Western countries have suddenly become “nice,” but because Western powers no longer have quite as many means to maintain their domination and hegemony. And we remain suspicious of this hypothesis—because if Putin is defeated by Western countries, this will contribute to giving them more power.
\n\nTherefore, we advise Ukrainians not to count on the “international community” or the United Nations—which, as in Syria, are conspicuous in their hypocrisy and tend to lure people into believing in chimeras.
\n\n“Campism” is the word we use to describe a doctrine from another era. During the Cold War, adherents of this dogma held that the most important thing was to support the USSR at all costs against capitalist and imperialist states. This doctrine persists today in the part of the radical left that supports Putin’s Russia in invading Ukraine or else relativizes the ongoing war. As they did in Syria, they use the pretext that the Russian or Syrian regimes embody the struggle against Western and Atlanticist [i.e., pro-NATO] imperialism. Unfortunately, this Manichean anti-imperialism, which is purely abstract, refuses to see imperialism in any actor other than the West.
\n\nHowever, it is necessary to acknowledge what the Russian, Chinese, and even Iranian regimes have been doing for years now. They have been extending their political and economic domination in certain regions by dispossessing the local populations of their self-determination. Let the campists use whatever word they like to describe this, if “imperialism” seems inadequate to them, but we will never accept any excusing of the inflicting of violence and domination on populations in the name of pseudo-theoretical precision.
\n\nWorse still, this position pushes this “left” to relay the propaganda of these regimes to the point of denying well-documented atrocities. They speak of a “coup d’etat” when they describe the Maidan uprising or deny the war crimes perpetrated by the Russian army in Syria. This left has gone so far as to deny the Assad regime’s use of sarin gas, relying on an (often understandable) distrust of mainstream media to spread these lies.
\n\nIt’s a despicable and irresponsible attitude, considering that the rise of conspiracy theories never favors an emancipatory position but rather the extreme right and racism. In the case of the war in Ukraine, these imbecile anti-imperialists, some of whom nevertheless claim to be anti-fascist, are the circumstantial allies of a large part of the extreme right.
\n\nIn Syria, enflamed with supremacist fantasies and dreams of a crusade against Islam, the far right already defended Putin and the Syrian regime for their alleged actions against jihadism—without ever understanding the responsibility that the Assad regime had for the rise of jihadists in Syria.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/07/5.jpg\")
Another photograph from Kafranbel.
\nIn Ukraine, the identity of the attacker is known to everyone. If Putin’s offensive is in some ways a response to pressure from NATO, it is above all the continuation of an imperial and counter-revolutionary offensive. After invading Crimea, after having helped crush the uprisings in Syria (2015-2022), Belarus (2020), and Kazakhstan (2022), Vladimir Putin no longer tolerates this wind of protest—embodied by the toppling of the pro-Russian president in the Maidan uprising—within countries under his influence. He wishes to crush any emancipatory desire that could weaken his power.
\n\nIn Syria too, there is no doubt as to who is directly responsible for the war. The Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, by ordering the police to shoot, imprison, and torture the demonstrators from the first days of protest, unilaterally chose to start a war against the population. We would like it if those who defend freedom and equality would be unanimous in taking a stand against such dictators who wage wars against the people. We would have liked it if this had been the case already, in reference to Syria.
\n\nIf we understand and join the call to end the war, we insist that we must do so without any ambiguity as to the identity of the aggressor. Neither in Ukraine nor in Syria nor anywhere else in the world can ordinary people be blamed for taking up arms to try to defend their own lives and those of their families.
\n\nMore generally, we advise people who don’t know what a dictatorship is (even if Western countries are becoming more overtly authoritarian) or what it is like to be bombed to refrain from telling Ukrainians—as some have already told Syrians or Hong Kongers—not to ask for help from the West or not to want liberal or representative democracy as a minimum political system. Many of these people are already clear on the imperfections of these political systems—but their priority is not to maintain an irreproachable political position, but rather to survive the next day’s bombings, or not to end up in a country in which a careless word can land you twenty years in prison. Insisting on this sort of purist discourse demonstrates a determination to impose one’s theoretical analysis on a context that is not one’s own. This indicates a real disconnection from the terrain and a very Western sort of privilege.
\n\nInstead, let’s listen to the words of Ukrainian comrades who said, echoing Mikhail Bakunin, “We firmly believe that the most imperfect republic is a thousand times better than the most enlightened monarchy.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/07/1.jpg\")
A souvenir shop in Damascus, Syria.
\nWe are familiar with the procedure in which a ruler designates a serious threat in order to scare off potential supporters. This includes the rhetoric about “Islamist terrorism” that Bashar al-Assad used from the first days of the revolution in Syria; likewise, today, the “Nazism” and “ultra-nationalism” Putin and his allies have brandished to justify their invasion of Ukraine.
\n\nIf, on the one hand, we recognize that this propaganda is deliberately exaggerated and that we must not legitimize it at face value, on the other hand, our experience in Syria encourages us not to underestimate the reactionary currents within popular movements.
\n\nIn Ukraine, Ukrainian nationalists, including fascists, played an important role in the Maidan protests and the ensuing war against Russia. Moreover, like the Azov Battalion, they profited from this experience and became a legitimate part of Ukraine’s regular army. However, this does not mean that the majority of Ukrainian society is ultra-nationalist or fascist. The far right won only 4% of the vote in the last elections; the Ukrainian, Jewish, and Russian-speaking president was elected by 73%.
\n\nIn the revolt in Syria, the jihadists started out as marginal actors, but they took on increasing importance, thanks in part to external support, allowing them to impose themselves militarily to the detriment of the civil movement and the most progressive participants. Everywhere, the extreme right threatens the extension of democracies and social revolutions; this is the case in France today without a doubt. In France, this same extreme right attempted to impose itself during the Yellow Vests movement. If it was beaten then, it was beaten because of the presence of egalitarian positions and the determination of anti-authoritarian and anti-fascist activists, not by the tongue-wagging of pundits.
\n\nTake care that defending the popular resistance (in both Ukraine and in Russia) against the Russian invasion does not amount to being naïve about the political regime that emerged from Maidan, either. It cannot be said that the fall of Yanukovych resulted in a real extension of direct democracy or the development of the egalitarian society that we wish for Syria, Russia, France, and everywhere in the world. Using an expression that is well known to us, some Ukrainian activists call the post-Maidan a “stolen revolution.” In addition to granting an important place to the ultra-nationalists, the Ukrainian regime was reestablished by oligarchs and others who were concerned with defending their own economic and political interests and extending a capitalist and neoliberal model of inequality. Likewise, though our knowledge on this subject remains limited, it is difficult for us to believe that the Ukrainian regime has no responsibility in the exacerbation of tensions with the separatist regions in Donbas.
\n\nIn Syria, the revolutionaries involved on the ground have every right to ferociously criticize the choices of the political opposition that is positioned in Istanbul. We still regret their choice not to take into account the legitimate claims of minorities like the Kurds.
\n\nA neoliberal regime and fascistic elements are ingredients found in all Western democracies. While these opponents of emancipation should not be underestimated, this is no reason not to champion popular resistance to an invasion. On the contrary, as we wish others had done during the Syrian revolution, we call on you to support the most progressive self-organized currents within the defense.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/07/6.jpg\")
The Arabic caption reads “The time of masculinity and men.”
\nAs the Arab revolutions, the Yellow Vests, and the Maidan have proven, the uprisings of the 21st century will not be ideologically “pure.” While we understand that it is more comfortable and galvanizing to identify with powerful (and victorious) actors, we must not betray our fundamental principles. We invite the radical left to take off their old conceptual glasses to confront their theoretical positions with reality. These positions must be adjusted according to reality, not the other way around.
\n\nIt is for these reasons that in Ukraine, we call for people to prioritize supporting initiatives that come from the base: the self-defense and self-organization initiatives that are currently flourishing. One can discover that often, people who organize themselves can in fact defend radical conceptions of democracy and social justice—even if they do not call themselves “leftist” or “progressive.”
\n\nAlso, as many Russian activists have said, we believe that a popular uprising in Russia could help end the war, just as in 1905 and 1917. When we consider the extent of the repression in Russia since the war began—over ten thousand demonstrators imprisoned, media censorship, the blocking of social networks and perhaps soon the internet—it is impossible not to hope that a revolution could lead to fall of the regime. This would finally put a stop, once and for all, to Putin’s crimes in Russia, Ukraine, Syria, and elsewhere.
\n\nThis is also the case for Syria where, following the internationalization of the conflict, far from resenting the Iranian, Russian, or Lebanese peoples, the uprisings of these peoples could make us believe again in the possibility that Bashar al-Assad will fall, as well.
\n\nLikewise, we want to see radical upheavals and radical extensions of democracy, justice, and equality in the United States, France, and every other country that bases its power on the oppression of other peoples or a part of its own population.
\n\nWhile we are radically opposed to all imperialisms and all modern forms of fascism, we believe that we cannot limit ourselves to anti-imperialist or anti-fascist postures alone. Even if they serve to explain many contexts, they also risk limiting the revolutionary struggle to a negative vision, reducing it to reactivity, to permanent resistance without a path forward.
\n\nWe believe that it remains essential to make a positive and constructive proposal such as internationalism. This means linking uprisings and struggles for equality all around the world.
\n\nA third option exists in addition to NATO and Putin: internationalism from below. Today, a revolutionary internationalism must call on people everywhere to defend the popular resistance in Ukraine, just as it should call upon them to support the Syrian local councils, the resistance committees in Sudan, the territorial assemblies in Chile, the roundabouts of the Yellow Vests, and the Palestinian intifada.
\n\nOf course, we live in the shadow of a workers’ internationalism—supported by states, parties, unions and large organizations—that was able to carry weight in international conflicts in Spain in 1936 and, later, in Vietnam and Palestine in the 1960s and ’70s.
\n\nToday, everywhere in the world—from Syria to France, from Ukraine to the United States—we lack large-scale emancipatory forces endowed with substantial material bases. While we hope for the emergence, as seems to be happening in Chile, of new revolutionary organizations based on local self-organized initiatives, we defend an internationalism that supports popular uprisings and welcomes all exiles. In this effort, too, we are preparing the ground for a real return to internationalism, which, we hope, one day will once again represent an alternative path distinct from the models of Western capitalist democracies and capitalist authoritarianism, whether Russian or Chinese.
\n\nSuch a conception of what we were doing, in Syria, would surely have helped the revolution to maintain a democratic and egalitarian color. Who knows, it might even have contributed to our achieving victory. Therefore, we are internationalists not only as a matter of ethical principle but also as a consequence of revolutionary strategy. We therefore defend the need to create links and alliances between self-organized forces working for the emancipation of all without distinction.
\n\nThis is what we call internationalism from below, the internationalism of the peoples.
\n\nUnfortunately, this is not much, but it’s all we can offer as long as there is no autonomous force here or elsewhere fighting for equality and emancipation that is capable of providing economic, political, or military support.
\n\nWe sincerely hope that, this time, these positions will carry the day. If that happens, we will be deeply happy, but we will never forget that this was far from being the case for Syria, and that it cost it dearly.
\n\n—The Syrian Canteen of Montreuil and L’équipe des Peuples Veulent
\n\n\n \n\n\n\n
The following texts informed this article or offer useful points of departure from it.
\n\nThis Twittter thread by Joey Ayoub compiles a great deal of material connecting the Syrian and Ukrainian contexts.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Ahmad_Baqari/status/1497480750547062786\n \n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/SyriaCivilDef/status/1499160006264033282\n \n
While it is true that the flag associated with the Syrian Revolution is also carried by militias who betrayed the revolution by allying with the Turkish government during its occupation of northern Syria and other territories, for the authors of this text, this symbol—seen in the photographs from Kafranbel—still represents the uprising of 2011. It was the flag of Syria when it declared its independence from France. By contrast, the current “official” flag (with two stars) symbolizes the domination of the Ba’ath party and a new colonization of Syria by the al-Assad family.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2022/03/04/spring-is-coming-take-to-the-streets-against-the-war-a-call-from-russia-for-demonstrations-against-the-invasion-of-ukraine", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2022/03/04/spring-is-coming-take-to-the-streets-against-the-war-a-call-from-russia-for-demonstrations-against-the-invasion-of-ukraine", "title": "Spring Is Coming: Take to the Streets against the War : A Call from Russia for Demonstrations against the Invasion of Ukraine", "summary": "Chamado para ações globais na Rússia contra a invasão na Ucrânia. ", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/04/header1.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/04/header1.jpg", "date_published": "2022-03-04T12:24:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:53Z", "tags": [ "Russia", "Ukraine", "fascism", "war", "anti-war", "anti-fascism", "call to action" ], "content_html": "The following call to action originally appeared in Russian on avtonom.org, the platform that emerged from the Russia-wide anarchist network Autonomous Action.
\n\nOur Russian colleagues report that, under a new law introduced this week, those who are found guilty of spreading misinformation about the invasion of Ukraine can be sentenced to years in prison. This apparently includes those who simply refer to the invasion as a “war,” rather than a “special operation,” as Putin’s government has insisted on doing. In this context, demonstrators show tremendous courage taking to the streets.
\n\nThe next mass day of protest is scheduled for this Sunday, March 6. We hope their efforts will be echoed by demonstrators around the world, placing pressure from all directions on the Russian government, the global capitalist class, military profiteers, and all the other forces that are abetting the invasion.
\n\nTo support demonstrators in Russia, donate to the Anarchist Black Cross in Moscow here. To support anarchists in Ukraine, donate here or here. There is also a solidarity structure to support refugees fleeing from Ukraine.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/04/5.jpg\")
The chief supporters of the reigning order in Russia today.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/04/6.jpg\")
Anti-war protesters in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
\nThe Russian army has invaded Ukraine. Putin has lost his senses and his army is bombing cities, shooting civilians, and killing children. More than one million people have fled the country in order to escape from Putin’s “liberators.”
\n\nWe refuse to submit to Russian military censorship. We say openly and clearly: this is war. This is a war of conquest and the Russian army is running it. With weapons in their hands, Ukrainians are successfully defending themselves from the invaders, but we, who are inside Russia, cannot stand aside from these events. We must show each other and the world that we are against this war, that only Putin and his gang need it. To be against the war is genuine anti-fascism right now.
\n\nMarch 6, this coming Sunday, is the general day of anti-war actions in Russia. Take the central square of your city! One of the meeting points in Moscow is the Square of the train stations at 15:00. There are also meetings at 19:00 and other times. Decide and organize for yourselves, team up with your friends. The main thing is to get out on the streets.
\n\nThe Russian authorities are panicking now. They have realized that they are losing this war. That is why they hysterically threaten anti-war protesters—with expulsion, or with dismissal, or with immediate conscription into the army, or with jail. Don’t be afraid of them. Ukrainians in their cities go out into the streets with bare hands to protest against the invaders. They are standing against solders with riffles, against tanks. How can one be afraid of the rusty machinery of the Russian police?
\n\nWe demand an immediate end to the war. We demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine. This is the main condition for any further action: the aggression of the Russian Federation must stop. We must stop the slaughter of people. Yes, Putin didn’t ask us when he planned the invasion—but we didn’t stop him in time. So it is important to do it at least now.
\n\nOf course, our main goal now is to stop the war in Ukraine. But we have to fight for the future of Russia, as well. There isn’t much time left for this deranged dictator. His small victorious war didn’t go according to the plan and now his removal is only a matter of time and concrete means. But what happens next, after Putin?
\n\nThe lands of the “Russian Federation” are now at a historical crossroads. The collapse of Putin’s regime may trigger the process of liberation. Sure, they won’t lead to anarchist ideals immediately—but at least Russia will no longer be at war with the rest of the world and with its own population. In this wave of changes, there will be opportunities for serious changes in the political system towards greater decentralization—for example, the complete abolition of the presidency and the transition to a parliamentary republic, which we have been talking about for a long time.
\n\nHowever, there’s another possibility for “what comes next” after Putin: the regime transforming into a pupal stage, into an even more authoritarian regime—the complete closure of all borders and the cessation of international contacts. Blocking half of the Internet in Russia tonight is only the first sign. There will no longer be any forces left for aggressive wars, but this will not make it easier for the inhabitants: they will find themselves in a state reminiscent of North Korea. And there is absolutely no anarchist movement in North Korea. None.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/04/4.jpg\")
The face of Russia’s future as well as present? It remains to be seen.
\nNow, in the coming days and weeks, we all have a unique window of opportunity. Putin’s authoritarian regime has made a fatal mistake and is reeling. If the psychopath in the Kremlin does not press the nuclear button, he will not live long. And now everything depends on us, the inhabitants of Russia. If we remain silent, then the agenda will quickly be hijacked by isolationists and conservatives, who are in the majority in the upper levels of power. But if we are active, we will win. A rusted leviathan needs only to be pushed and it will crumble into dust.
\n\nTake the streets on March 6. If you can’t go out on March 6, go out on other days. If you can’t go out at all, protest against the war in other ways: distribute leaflets and posters, stick up stickers, write “no war” on medical masks, hang posters from balconies. Finally, talk to people. This is now more important than studies, more important than work, more important than anything else in the world. Now the fate of not only Ukraine, but also Russia is being decided. Our future is being determined—and only we will be responsible for what it will be.
\n\nWinter is ending. Spring is coming.
\n\n\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/04/1.jpg\")
A sticker reading “no war” in St. Petersburg, Russia.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/04/2.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/04/3.jpg\")
A sticker reading “no war” on an urban map in Russia.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/03/04/7.jpg\")
A poster attached to a backpack with charming pins, belonging to a Russian anti-war protester.
\nIn this hasty update, we review some of today’s efforts to resist the Russian invasion of Ukraine—from both Russians within the repressive conditions of Russian society and Ukrainians experiencing the full force of military attacks. There is a great deal more to be said about this subject than we can cover here. We will return to analysis shortly, but for now, we aim chiefly to put this information at your disposal rapidly. Those who require background may begin here for a Russian perspective or here for a Ukrainian perspective.
\n\nToday, Russians participated in risky illegal public demonstrations around the country; you can see footage from several of them in this Twitter thread.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/EilishHart/status/1496903893812396039\n\n\n
Ukrainian anarchists made a call for demonstrations at Russian embassies and consulates around the world. As of now, we have seen reports from demonstrations in Finland, England, Turkey, France, Switzerland, and several cities in Germany including Flensburg, Bonn, Berlin, Dortmund, and Dresden. In Israel/Palestine, there were demonstrations in Haifa and Tel Aviv. In the United States, there were solidarity actions at consulates in Seattle and elsewhere. Many of these demonstrations involved hundreds of people—and significantly, they have not been filled with nationalist flags, like most of the other demonstrations in favor of the Ukrainian state. Banners expressing support have appeared from Bulgaria to Manila.
\n\nThose who wish to donate to support anarchists in Ukraine may donate here or here. There is also a solidarity structure emerging to support refugees fleeing from Ukraine. [Update, July 5, 2022: Operation Solidarity has suspended operations and is directing people to other projects, as you can read about here.] You can support the Anarchist Black Cross in Moscow in its efforts to support arrested and incarcerated protesters in Russia here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/24/2.jpg\")
On February 24, 2022, anarchists stood at the head of a demonstration for peace in Ukraine and the freedom of Russia, moving along Tverskoy Boulevard in Moscow in the direction from Pushkinskaya Square to Arbat. At about 8 pm, the march was dispersed at the monument to Timiryazev and the police made arrests.
\nA hasty translation of a statement from Food Not Bombs Moscow, which appeared on their Telegram channel a few hours ago.
\n\nWe will never take the side of this or that state, our flag is black, we are against borders and freeloader presidents. We are against wars and killings of civilians.
\n\nPalaces, yachts, and prison sentences and torture for dissenting Russians are not enough for Putin’s imperial gang, they should be given war and the seizure of new territories. And so, “defenders of the fatherland” invade Ukraine, bombing residential areas. Huge sums are being invested in murder weapons while the people are impoverished more and more.
\n\nThere are those who have nothing to eat and nowhere to live, not because there are not enough resources for everyone, but because they are distributed unfairly: someone has a lot of palaces, while others did not even get a hut.
\n\nIn order to keep and increase the benefits in their hands, the government declares wars. Who will collect their intestines with their hands, who will have their arms and legs torn off by explosions, whose families will bury their children? Of course, all this does not apply to the ruling minority.
\n\nWe must resist the militaristic regime and the war it is waging with all our might. Spread information among your comrades, fight as best you can. No war but the class war. Solidarity instead of bombs.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/bad_immigrant/status/1496961410261258240\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/EilishHart/status/1496940047693713413\n\n\n
We conducted an audio interview with a spokesperson from “The Committee of Resistance,” the newly formed anarchist coordinating group in Ukraine. They will be fielding public inquiries about what anarchists are doing and experiencing in Ukraine here. We transcribed the interview as we talked.
\n\n“The Committee of Resistance” is a coordination center connecting anarchists who are participating in resisting the invasion in a variety of ways. Some are currently on the front; some are engaged in media work about the conditions arising during this resistance, in hopes of clarifying the situation in Ukraine to those who have never been there and explaining to anarchists elsewhere why they believe that resisting Putin is connected with liberation. The project will also be engaging in some support projects in whatever remains of Ukrainian civil society as the invasion proceeds—for example, in Mariupol’, some participants brought material support to the center hosting children orphaned by the war—and will assist some comrades in escaping from the conflict zone, though “dozens and dozens” of anarchists and anti-fascists are participating in the resistance.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1497957394193674244\n\n\n
As of now, the participants are watching to see what mutual aid projects will emerge in Kyiv out of efforts on the part of the population as a whole, and which ones they can participate in most effectively as anarchists.
\n\nThe person we spoke with is currently located in Kyiv; others have already departed to participate in territorial defense in the regions surrounding Kyiv. In Kyiv, many people are leaving the city, but there has not been aerial bombing since the morning, when the Russian air force attacked military targets around the city and also hit some civilian housing areas in outlying towns, including Brovary, killing dozens of people.
\n\nIn Kyiv, the atmosphere is tense, but there is no fighting in the city yet, only the aircraft attacks of the morning. Thus far, anarchists have experienced no known casualties, but they are facing serious dangers. It is a hard situation, but so far, the participants’ spirits are high.
\n\nThe majority of the participants in this project were expecting the invasion to begin soon, generally speaking, but they were not expecting it today, and were not entirely mentally prepared for it. In fact, they planned and prepared for months, but now they are discovering everything that remained unfinished in their preparations. Still, in the course of hasty meetings, they have pulled together this coordination project.
\n\nThe spokesperson described their immediate goal: it is not to protect the Ukrainian state, but to protect Ukrainian people and the form of Ukrainian society, which is still pluralistic, even though the Ukrainian state itself is neoliberal and a nationstate with nationalism and all the other terrible things that come with that. “Our idea is that we have to defend the spirit of this society against being smashed by Putin’s regime, which threatens the entire existence of the society.”
\n\nPanning back from that immediate goal, the spokesperson said that they hope to confront Russian military aggression while promoting anarchist perspectives both within Ukrainian society and throughout the world—to show that anarchists are involved in this struggle, that they have taken sides in it—not with the state, but with the people who are impacted by the invasion, with the society of the people who live in Ukraine.
\n\n“It is not an exaggeration to say that the whole population is confronting the invasion. Of course, some people are fleeing, but any force that has any investment in the political development of this place in the future has to be on the side of the people here right now. We want to make some inroads towards being connected with people here on a larger scale, towards getting organized with them. Our long-term task, our dream, is to become a visible political force within this society in order to secure a real opportunity to promote a message of social liberation for people.”
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/bad_immigrant/status/1499086971876032517\n\n\n
In response to the statement that the “whole population is confronting the invasion,” we inquired as to whether that included the people in the “republics,” the Luhansk People’s Republic [LPR] and Donetsk People’s Republic [DPR]—the regions in eastern Ukraine that have been occupied by Russian-armed and funded separatist forces since 2014, which Putin just recognized as “independent.”
\n\n“Honestly,” the spokesperson answered, “I have little perspective about the people in the so-called republics; I have only lived here for several years”—having grown up in a neighboring country—”and have never been to the southeast. It’s true that there have been some conflicts about language, and local far-right people have exacerbated these conflicts needlessly and severely. For this reason, in the ‘republics,’ we saw some people waving Russian state flags to welcome the troops, even though this ‘independence’ will mean the opposite, it will mean being totally subservient to Putin. At the same time, nearby across the trenches, on the other side of the battle lines, we saw thousands of people waving Ukraine’s national flags. We don’t like this, either, as anarchists, but it does mean that people are ready to fight—that they are ready to defend their independence not only as a state but as a society.”
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/bad_immigrant/status/1496968005212721153\n\n\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/24/1.jpg\")
“This is the Kyiv subway now. Frightened people gathered underground to avoid possible bombings from Putin’s regime.”
\nWe will follow up soon with more news.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2022/02/22/against-annexations-and-imperial-aggression-a-statement-from-russian-anarchists-against-russian-aggression-in-ukraine", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2022/02/22/against-annexations-and-imperial-aggression-a-statement-from-russian-anarchists-against-russian-aggression-in-ukraine", "title": "Against Annexations and Imperial Aggression : A Statement from Russian Anarchists against Russian Aggression in Ukraine", "summary": "A statement from a network of Russian anarchists against Russian aggression in Ukraine.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/22/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/22/header.jpg", "date_published": "2022-02-22T09:08:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:53Z", "tags": [ "Russia", "Ukraine", "war", "civil war", "anti-war", "anti-imperialism", "anti-fascism" ], "content_html": "This statement appeared in Russian on avtonom.org, a media project that grew out of the libertarian communist network Autonomous Action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/22/1.jpg\")
“No War Between Nations! No Peace Between Classes!” A mural in Moscow promoting Autonomous Action.
\nYesterday, on February 21, an extraordinary meeting of the Russian Security Council was held. As part of this theatrical act, Putin forced his closest servants to publicly “ask” him to recognize the independence of the so-called “people’s republics” of the Luhansk People’s Republic [LPR] and Donetsk People’s Republic [DPR] in eastern Ukraine.
\n\nIt is quite obvious that this is a step towards the further annexation of these territories by Russia—no matter how it is formalized (or not formalized) legally. In fact, the Kremlin ceases to consider the LPR and DPR part of Ukraine and finally makes them its protectorate. “First the recognition of independence, then annexation”: this sequence was already worked out in 2014 in Crimea. This is also clear from Naryshkin’s stupid reservations at the meeting of the Security Council (“Yes, I support the entry of these territories into the Russian Federation “).1 Since the meeting, as it turned out, was broadcast on tape [rather than live], and these “reservations” were not cut out, but left in—the hint is clear.
\n\nIn an “appeal to the people” that same evening, Putin seemed to “agree” with these requests and announced the recognition of the LPR and DPR as independent states. In fact, he said the following: “We are taking a piece of the Donbass, and if Ukraine rocks the boat, then let it blame itself, we don’t consider it a state at all, so we’ll take even more.” According to Putin’s decree, Russian troops are already entering the territory of the LPR and DPR. This is a clear gesture of threat towards the rest of Ukraine and especially towards the parts of the Lugansk and Donetsk regions still controlled by Ukraine. This is the actual occupation [in the sense that until now, Luhansk and Donetsk were only occupied by proxy].
\n\nWe do not want to stand up for any states. We are anarchists and we are against any borders between nations. But we are against this annexation, because it only establishes new borders, and the decision on this is made solely by the authoritarian leader—Vladimir Putin. This is an act of imperialist aggression by Russia. We have no illusions about the Ukrainian state, but it is clear to us that it is not the main aggressor in this story—this is not a confrontation between two equal evils. First of all, this is an attempt by the Russian authoritarian government to solve its internal problems through a “small victorious war and the accumulation of lands” [a reference to Ivan III].
\n\nIt is quite probable that the Kremlin regime will stage some kind of spectacle of a “referendum” on the annexed lands. Such performances already took place in the DPR and LPR in 2014, but not even Moscow recognized their results. Now, apparently, Putin has decided to change that. Of course, there can be no talk of any “free and secret voting” in these territories—they are under the control of militarized gangs completely dependent on Moscow. Those who were opposed to these gangs and against integration with Russia were either killed or forced to emigrate. Thus, any “referendum on the return of Donbass like a lost ship to its native harbor” will be a propaganda lie. The residents of Donbass will be able to formulate their decision only when the troops of all states—and first of all the Russian Federation—leave these territories.
\n\nThe recognition and annexation of the DPR and LPR will not bring anything good to the inhabitants of Russia itself.
\n\nFirst, in any case, this will lead to the militarization of all spheres of life, even greater international isolation of Russia, sanctions and a decline in general well-being. Restoring the destroyed infrastructure and taking the “people’s republics” into the state budget will not be free, either—both will cost billions of rubles that could otherwise be spent on education and medicine. Have no doubt: the yachts of the Russian oligarchs will not become smaller, but everyone else will begin to live worse.
\n\nSecond, the likely aggravation of the armed confrontation with Ukraine will mean more dead and wounded soldiers and civilians, more destroyed cities and villages, more blood. Even if this conflict does not escalate into a world war, Putin’s imperial fantasies are not worth a single life.
\n\nThird, this will mean the further spread of the so-called “Russian world”: a crazy combination of neoliberal oligarchy, rigid centralized power, and patriarchal imperial propaganda. This consequence is not as obvious as the rise in the price of sausages and the sanctions on smartphones—but in the long run, it is even more dangerous.
\n\nWe urge you to counter the Kremlin’s aggression by any means you see fit. Against the seizure of territories under any pretext, against sending the Russian army to the Donbass, against militarization. And ultimately, against the war. Take to the streets, spread the word, talk to the people around you—you know what to do. Do not be silent. Take action. Even a small screw can jam the gears of a death machine.
\n\nAgainst all borders, against all empires, against all wars!
\n\n\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/22/2.jpg\")
\nSergey Naryshkin, head of Russian foreign intelligence, stumbled in response to a question from Putin, accidentally proposing to absorb the DPR and LPR into Russia when he was not supposed to say that part aloud yet. ↩
\nWe present this article composed by anarchists in Ukraine to give context for how some participants in social movements there see the difficult events that have played out there over the past nine years. We believe that it is important for people everywhere to grapple with the events they describe below and the questions that those developments pose. This text should be read in the context of the other perspectives we have published from Ukraine and Russia.
\n\nThis text was composed together by several active anti-authoritarian activists from Ukraine. We do not represent one organization, but we came together to write this text and prepare for a possible war.
\n\nBesides us, the text was edited by more than ten people, including participants in the events described in the text, journalists who checked the accuracy of our claims, and anarchists from Russia, Belarus, and Europe. We received many corrections and clarifications in order to write the most objective text possible.
\n\nIf war breaks out, we do not know if the anti-authoritarian movement will survive, but we will try to do so. In the meantime, this text is an attempt to leave the experience that we have accumulated online.
\n\nAt the moment, the world is actively discussing a possible war between Russia and Ukraine. We need to clarify that the war between Russia and Ukraine has been going on since 2014.
\n\nBut first things first.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/15/1.jpg\")
\nIn 2013, mass protests began in Ukraine, triggered by Berkut (police special forces) beating up student protesters who were dissatisfied with the refusal of then-President Viktor Yanukovych to sign the association agreement with the European Union. This beating functioned as a call to action for many segments of society. It became clear to everyone that Yanukovych had crossed the line. The protests ultimately led to the president fleeing.
\n\nIn Ukraine, these events are called “The Revolution of Dignity.” The Russian government presents it as a Nazi coup, a US State Department project, and so on. The protesters themselves were a motley crowd: far-right activists with their symbols, liberal leaders talking about European values and European integration, ordinary Ukrainians who went out against the government, a few leftists. Anti-oligarchic sentiments dominated among the protesters, while oligarchs who did not like Yanukovych financed the protest because he, along with his inner circle, tried to monopolize big business during his term. That is to say—for other oligarchs, the protest represented a chance to save their businesses. Also, many representatives of mid-size and small businesses participated in the protest because Yanukovych’s people did not allow them to work freely, demanding money from them. Ordinary people were dissatisfied with the high level of corruption and arbitrary conduct of the police. The nationalists who opposed Yanukovych on the grounds that he was a pro-Russian politician reasserted themselves significantly. Belarusian and Russian expatriates joined protests, perceiving Yanukovych as a friend of Belarusian and Russian dictators Alexander Lukashenko and Vladimir Putin.
\n\nIf you have seen videos from the Maidan rally, you might have noticed that the degree of violence was high; the protesters had no place to pull back to, so they had to fight to the bitter end. The Berkut wrapped stun grenades with screw nuts that left splinter wounds after the explosion, hitting people in their eyes; that is why there were many injured people. In the final stages of the conflict, the security forces used military weapons—killing 106 protesters.
\n\nIn response, the protesters produced DIY grenades and explosives and brought firearms to the Maidan. The manufacturing of Molotov cocktails resembled small divisions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/15/2.jpg\")
\nIn the 2014 Maidan protests, the authorities used mercenaries (titushkas), gave them weapons, coordinated them, and tried to use them as an organized loyalist force. There were fights with them involving sticks, hammers, and knives.
\n\nContrary to the opinion that the Maidan was a “manipulation by the EU and NATO,” supporters of European integration had called for a peaceful protest, deriding militant protesters as stooges. The EU and the United States criticized the seizures of government buildings. Of course, “pro-Western” forces and organizations participated in the protest, but they did not control the entire protest. Various political forces including the far right actively interfered in the movement and tried to dictate their agenda. They quickly got their bearings and became an organizing force, thanks to the fact that they created the first combat detachments and invited everyone to join them, training and directing them.
\n\nHowever, none of the forces was absolutely dominant. The main trend was that it was a spontaneous protest mobilization directed against the corrupt and unpopular Yanukovych regime. Perhaps the Maidan can be classified as one of the many “stolen revolutions.” The sacrifices and efforts of tens of thousands of ordinary people were usurped by a handful of politicians who made their way to power and control over the economy.
\n\nDespite the fact that anarchists in Ukraine have a long history, during the reign of Stalin, everyone who was connected with the anarchists in any way was repressed and the movement died out, and consequently, the transfer of revolutionary experience ceased. The movement began to recover in the 1980s thanks to the efforts of historians, and in the 2000s it received a big boost due to the development of subcultures and anti-fascism. But in 2014, it was not yet ready for serious historical challenges.
\n\nPrior to the beginning of the protests, anarchists were individual activists or scattered in small groups. Few argued that the movement should be organized and revolutionary. Of the well-known organizations that were preparing for such events, there was Makhno Revolutionary Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists (RCAS of Makhno), but at the beginning of the riots, it dissolved itself, as the participants could not develop a strategy for the new situation.
\n\nThe events of the Maidan were like a situation in which the special forces break into your house and you need to take decisive actions, but your arsenal consists only of punk lyrics, veganism, 100-year-old books, and at best, the experience of participating in street anti-fascism and local social conflicts. Consequently, there was a lot of confusion, as people attempted to understand what was happening.
\n\nAt the time, it was not possible to form a unified vision of the situation. The presence of the far-right in the streets discouraged many anarchists from supporting the protests, as they did not want to stand beside Nazis on the same side of the barricades. This brought a lot of controversy into the movement; some people accused those who did decide to join the protests of fascism.
\n\nThe anarchists who participated in the protests were dissatisfied with the brutality of the police and with Yanukovych himself and his pro-Russian position. However, they could not have a significant impact on the protests, as they were essentially in the category of outsiders.
\n\nIn the end, anarchists participated in the Maidan revolution individually and in small groups, mainly in volunteer/non-militant initiatives. After a while, they decided to cooperate and make their own “hundred” (a combat group of 60-100 people). But during the registration of the detachment (a mandatory procedure on the Maidan), the outnumbered anarchists were dispersed by the far-right participants with weapons. The anarchists remained, but no longer attempted to create large organized groups.
\n\nAmong those killed on the Maidan was the anarchist Sergei Kemsky who was, ironically, ranked as postmortem Hero of Ukraine. He was shot by a sniper during the heated phase of the confrontation with the security forces. During the protests, Sergei put forward an appeal to the protesters entitled “Do you hear it, Maidan?” in which he outlined possible ways of developing the revolution, emphasizing the aspects of direct democracy and social transformation. The text is available in English here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/15/3.jpg\")
Gathering of an anarchist squad.
\nThe armed conflict with Russia began eight years ago on the night of February 26-27, 2014, when the Crimean Parliament building and the Council of Ministers were seized by unknown armed men. They used Russian weapons, uniforms, and equipment but did not have the symbols of the Russian army. Putin did not recognize the fact of the participation of the Russian military in this operation, although he later admitted it personally in the documentary propaganda film “Crimea: The way to the Homeland”.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/15/4.jpg\")
Armed men in uniforms without insignias blocking a Ukrainian military unit in Crimea on March 9, 2014.
\nHere, one needs to understand that during the time of Yanukovych, the Ukrainian army was in very poor condition. Knowing that there was a regular Russian army of 220,000 soldiers operating in Crimea, the provisional government of Ukraine did not dare to confront it.
\n\nAfter the occupation, many residents have faced repression that continues to this day. Our comrades are also among the repressed. We can briefly review some of the most high-profile cases. Anarchist Alexander Kolchenko was arrested along with pro-democratic activist Oleg Sentsov and transferred to Russia on May 16, 2014; five years later, they were released as a result of a prisoner exchange. Anarchist Alexei Shestakovich was tortured, suffocated with a plastic bag on his head, beaten, and threatened with reprisals; he managed to escape. Anarchist Evgeny Karakashev was arrested in 2018 for a re-post on Vkontakte (a social network); he remains in custody.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/15/5.jpg\")
Anarchist Alexander Kolchenko after prisoner exchange.
\nPro-Russian rallies were held in Russian-speaking cities close to the Russian border. The participants feared NATO, radical nationalists, and repression targeting the Russian-speaking population. After the collapse of the USSR, many households in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus had family ties, but the events of the Maidan caused a serious split in personal relations. Those who were outside Kyiv and watched Russian TV were convinced that Kyiv had been captured by a Nazi junta and that there were purges of the Russian-speaking population there.
\n\nRussia launched a propaganda campaign using the following messaging: “punishers,” i.e., Nazis, are coming from Kyiv to Donetsk, they want to destroy the Russian-speaking population (although Kyiv is also a predominantly Russian-speaking city). In their disinformation statements, the propagandists used photos of the far right and spread all kinds of fake news. During the hostilities, one of the most notorious hoaxes appeared: the so-called crucifixion of a three-year-old boy who was allegedly attached to a tank and dragged along the road. In Russia, this story was broadcasted on federal channels and went viral on the Internet.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/15/6.jpg\")
Fake news from a Russian channel. A woman tells how she saw the executions and the crucifixion of a three-year-old boy.
\nIn 2014, in our opinion, disinformation played a key role in generating the armed conflict: some residents of Donetsk and Lugansk were scared that they would be killed, so they took up arms and called for Putin’s troops.
\n\n“The trigger of the war was pulled,” in his own words, by Igor Girkin, a colonel of the FSB (the state security agency, successors to the KGB) of the Russian Federation. Girkin, a supporter of Russian imperialism, decided to radicalize the pro-Russian protests. He crossed the border with an armed group of Russians and (on April 12, 2014) seized the Interior Ministry building in Slavyansk to take possession of weapons. Pro-Russian security forces began to join Girkin. When information about Girkin’s armed groups appeared, Ukraine announced an anti-terrorist operation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/15/7.jpg\")
\nA part of Ukrainian society determined to protect national sovereignty, realizing that the army had poor capacity, organized a large volunteer movement. Those who were somewhat competent in military affairs became instructors or formed volunteer battalions. Some people joined the regular army and volunteer battalions as humanitarian volunteers. They raised funds for weapons, food, ammunition, fuel, transport, renting civil cars, and the like. Often, the participants in the volunteer battalions were armed and equipped better than the soldiers of the state army. These detachments demonstrated a significant level of solidarity and self-organization and actually replaced the state functions of territorial defense, enabling the army (which was poorly equipped at that time) to successfully resist the enemy.
\n\nThe territories controlled by pro-Russian forces began to shrink rapidly. Then the regular Russian army intervened.
\n\nWe can highlight three key chronological points:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/15/8.jpg\")
Volunteer fighters carrying out actions in Ilovaisk in 2014.
\nFor the time being (as of February 2022), the parties have agreed on a ceasefire and a conditional “peace and quiet” order, which is maintained, though there are consistent violations. Several people die every month.
\n\nRussia denies the presence of regular Russian troops and the supply of weapons to territories uncontrolled by the Ukrainian authorities. The Russian military who were captured claim that they were put on alert for a drill, and only when they arrived at their destination did they realize that they were in the middle of the war in Ukraine. Before crossing the border, they removed the symbols of the Russian army, the way their colleagues did in Crimea. In Russia, journalists have found cemeteries of fallen soldiers, but all information about their deaths is unknown: the epitaphs on the headstones only indicate the dates of their deaths as the year 2014.
\n\nThe ideological basis of the opponents of the Maidan was also diverse. The main unifying ideas were discontent with violence against the police and opposition to rioting in Kyiv. People who were brought up with Russian cultural narratives, movies, and music were afraid of the destruction of the Russian language. Supporters of the USSR and admirers of its victory in World War II believed that Ukraine should be aligned with Russia and were unhappy with the rise of radical nationalists. Adherents of the Russian Empire perceived the Maidan protests as a threat to the territory of the Russian Empire. The ideas of these allies could be explained with this photo showing the flags of the USSR, the Russian Empire, and the St. George ribbon as a symbol of victory in the Second World War. We could portray them as authoritarian conservatives, supporters of the old order.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/15/9.jpg\")
The flags of the USSR, the Russian Empire, and the St. George ribbon as a symbol of victory in the Second World War.
\nThe pro-Russian side consisted of police, entrepreneurs, politicians, and the military who sympathized with Russia, ordinary citizens frightened by fake news, various ultra-right indivisuals including Russian patriots and various types of monarchists, pro-Russian imperialists, the Task Force group “Rusich,” the PMC [Private Military Company] group “Wagner,” including the notorious neo-Nazi Alexei Milchakov, the recently deceased Egor Prosvirnin, the founder of the chauvinistic Russian nationalist media project “Sputnik and Pogrom,” and many others. There were also authoritarian leftists, who celebrate the USSR and its victory in the Second World War.
\n\nAs we described, the right wing managed to gain sympathy during the Maidan by organizing combat units and by being ready to physically confront the Berkut. The presence of military arms enabled them to maintain their independence and force others to reckon with them. In spite of their using overt fascist symbols such as swastikas, wolf hooks, Celtic crosses, and SS logos, it was difficult to discredit them, as the need to fight the forces of the Yanukovych government caused many Ukrainians to call for cooperation with them.
\n\nAfter the Maidan, the right wing actively suppressed the rallies of pro-Russian forces. At the beginning of the military operations, they started forming volunteer battalions. One of the most famous is the “Azov” battalion. At the beginning, it consisted of 70 fighters; now it is a regiment of 800 people with its own armored vehicles, artillery, tank company, and a separate project in accordance with NATO standards, the sergeant school. The Azov battalion is one of the most combat-effective units in the Ukrainian army. There were also other fascist military formations such as the Volunteer Ukrainian Unit “Right Sector” and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, but they are less widely known.
\n\nAs a consequence, the Ukrainian right wing accrued a bad reputation in the Russian media. But many in Ukraine considered what was hated in Russia to be a symbol of struggle in Ukraine. For example, the name of the nationalist Stepan Bandera, who is known chiefly as a Nazi collaborator in Russia, was actively used by the protesters as a form of mockery. Some called themselves Judeo-Banderans to troll supporters of Jewish/Masonic conspiracy theories.
\n\nOver time, the trolling contributed to a rise in far-right activity. Right-wingers openly wore Nazi symbols; ordinary supporters of the Maidan claimed that they were themselves Banderans who eat Russian babies and made memes to that effect. The far right made its way into the mainstream: they were invited to participate in television shows and other corporate media platforms, on which they were presented as patriots and nationalists. Liberal supporters of the Maidan took their side, believing that the Nazis were a hoax invented by Russian media. In 2014 to 2016, anyone who was ready to fight was embraced, whether it was a Nazi, an anarchist, a kingpin from an organized crime syndicate, or a politician who did not carry out any of his promises.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/15/10.jpg\")
Far-right fighters with a swastika and a NATO flag. The Azov battalion has a negative attitude towards NATO; currently, the US does not transfer weapons to Azov.
\nThe rise of the far right is due to the fact that they were better organized in critical situations and were able to suggest effective methods of fighting to other rebels. Anarchists provided something similar in Belarus, where they also managed to gain the sympathy of the public, but not on as significant of a scale as the far right did in Ukraine.
\n\nBy 2017, after the ceasefire started and the need for radical fighters decreased, the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine) and the state government co-opted the right-wing movement, jailing or neutralizing anyone who had an “anti-system” or independent perspective on how to develop the right-wing movement—including Oleksandr Muzychko, Oleg Muzhchil, Yaroslav Babich, and others.
\n\nToday, it is still a big movement, but their popularity is at a comparably low level and their leaders are affiliated with the Security service, police, and politicians; they do not represent a really independent political force. The discussions of the problem of the far-right are becoming more frequent within the democratic camp, where people are developing an understanding of the symbols and organizations they are dealing with, rather than silently dismissing concerns.
\n\nWith the outbreak of military operations, a division appeared between those who are pro-Ukrainian and those who support the so-called DNR/LNR (“Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic”).
\n\nThere was a widespread “say no to war” sentiment within the punk scene during the first months of the war, but it did not last long. Let’s analyze the pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian camps.
\n\nDue to the lack of a massive organization, the first anarchist and anti-fascist volunteers went to war individually as single fighters, military medics, and volunteers. They tried to form their own squad, but due to lack of knowledge and resources, this attempt was unsuccessful. Some people even joined the Azov battalion and the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists). The reasons were mundane: they joined the most accessible troops. Consequently, some people converted to right-wing politics.
\n\n[Editors’ note: Although we do not know the details of these events—and it is difficult to confirm them while the authors are in the midst of a full-scale war—obviously any supposed anti-fascist or “anarchist” who joined a fascist-organized militia was never really an anarchist in the first place. We preserve this paragraph as it arrived because we believe it is important to be critical and to center the voices of people in the midst of the events. You can read more of our thoughts about it here.]
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/15/11.jpg\")
People who didn’t take part in the battles raised funds for the rehabilitation of people injured in the East and for the construction of a bomb shelter in a kindergarten located near the front line. There was also a squat named “Autonomy” in Kharkiv, an open anarchist social and cultural center; at that time, they concentrated on helping the refugees. They provided housing and a permanent really free market, consulting with new arrivals and directing them to resources and conducting educational activities. In addition, the center became a place for theoretical discussions. Unfortunately, in 2018, the project ceased to exist.
\n\nAll these actions were the individual initiatives of particular people and groups. They did not happen within the framework of a single strategy.
\n\nOne of the most significant phenomena of that period was a formerly large radical nationalist organization, “Autonomnyi Opir” (autonomous resistance). They started leaning left in 2012; by 2014, they had shifted so much to the left that individual members would even call themselves “anarchists.” They framed their nationalism as a struggle for “liberty” and a counterbalance to Russian nationalism, using the Zapatista movement and the Kurds as role models. Compared to the other projects in Ukrainian society, they were seen as the closest allies, so some anarchists cooperated with them, while others criticized this cooperation and the organization itself. Members of the AO also actively participated in volunteer battalions and tried to develop the idea of “anti-imperialism” among the military. They also defended the right of women to participate in the war; female members of the AO participated in the combat operations. AO assisted training centers in training fighters and doctors, volunteered for the army, and organized the social center “Citadel” in Lviv where refugees were accommodated.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/15/12.jpg\")
Moscow, 2014: Anarchists marching against Russian aggression.
\nModern Russian imperialism is built on the perception that Russia is the successor of the USSR—not in its political system, but on territorial grounds. The Putin regime sees the Soviet victory in World War II not as an ideological victory over Nazism, but as a victory over Europe that shows the strength of Russia. In Russia and the countries it controls, the population has less access to information, so Putin’s propaganda machine does not bother to create a complex political concept. The narrative is essentially as follows: The USA and Europe were afraid of the strong USSR, Russia is the successor of the USSR and the entire territory of the former USSR is Russian, Russian tanks entered Berlin, which means that “We can do it again” and we’ll show NATO who is the strongest here, the reason Europe is “rotting” is because all of the gays and emigrants are out of control there.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/15/13.jpg\")
Very popular stickers in Russia in 2014 and 2015. The inscription reads “We can do it again.”
\nThe ideological foundation maintaining a pro-Russian position among the left was the legacy of the USSR and its victory in World War II. Since Russia clams that the government in Kyiv was seized by Nazis and the junta, the opponents of the Maidan described themselves as fighters against fascism and the Kyiv junta. This branding induced sympathy among the authoritarian left—for example, in Ukraine, including the “Borotba” organization. During the most significant events of 2014, they first took a loyalist position and then later a pro-Russian position. In Odessa, on May 2, 2014, several of their activists were killed during street riots. Some people from this group also participated in the fighting in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, and some of them died there.
\n\n“Borotba” described their motivation as wishing to fight against fascism. They urged the European left to stand in solidarity with the “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic.” After the e-mail of Vladislav Surkov (Putin’s political strategist) was hacked, it was revealed that members of Borotba had received funding and were supervised by Surkov’s people.
\n\nRussia’s authoritarian communists embraced the breakaway republics for similar reasons.
\n\nThe presence of far-right supporters in the Maidan also motivated apolitical anti-fascists to support the “DNR” and “LNR.” Again, some of them participated in the fighting in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, and some of them died there.
\n\nAmong Ukrainian anti-fascists, there were “apolitical” anti-fascists, subculturally-affiliated people who had a negative attitude towards fascism “because our grandfathers fought against it.” Their understanding of fascism was abstract: they themselves were often politically incoherent, sexist, homophobic, patriots of Russia, and the like.
\n\nThe idea of supporting the so-called republics gained wide backing among the left in Europe. Most notable among its supporters were the Italian rock band “Banda Bassotti” and the German party Die Linke. In addition to fundraising, Banda Bassotti made a tour to “Novorossia.” Being in the European Parliament, Die Linke supported the pro-Russian narrative in every possible way and arranged video conferences with pro-Russian militants, going to Crimea and the unrecognized republics. The younger members of Die Linke, as well as the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation (the Die Linke party foundation), maintain that this position is not shared by every participant, but it is broadcasted by the most prominent members of the party, such as Sahra Wagenknecht and Sevim Dağdelen.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/15/14.jpg\")
Banda Bassotti in Donetsk in 2014.
\nThe pro-Russian position did not gain popularity among anarchists. Among individual statements, the most visible was the position of Jeff Monson, a mixed martial arts fighter from the USA who has tattoos with anarchist symbols. He previously considered himself an anarchist, but in Russia, he openly works for the ruling United Russia party and serves as a deputy in the Duma.
\n\nTo summarize the pro-Russian “left” camp, we see the work of the Russian special services and the consequences of ideological incapacity. After the occupation of Crimea, employees of the Russian FSB approached local anti-fascists and anarchists in conversation, offering to permit them to continue their activities but suggesting that they should henceforward include the idea that Crimea should be a part of Russia in their agitation. In Ukraine, there are small informational and activist groups that position themselves as anti-fascist while expressing an essentially pro-Russian position; many people suspect them of working for Russia. Their influence is minimal in Ukraine, but their members serve Russian propagandists as “whistleblowers.”
\n\nThere are also offers of “cooperation” from the Russian embassy and pro-Russian members of Parliament like Ilya Kiva. They try to play on the negative attitude towards Nazis like the Azov battalion and offer to pay people to change their position. At the moment, only Rita Bondar has openly admitted to receiving money in this way. She used to write for left-wing and anarchist media outlets, but due to the need for money, she wrote under a pseudonym for media platforms affiliated with the Russian propagandist Dmitry Kiselev.
\n\nIn Russia itself, we are witnessing the elimination of the anarchist movement and the rise of authoritarian communists who are ousting anarchists from the anti-fascist subculture. One of the most indicative recent moments is the organizing of an anti-fascist tournament in 2021 in memory of “the Soviet soldier.”
\n\nAbout ten years ago, the idea of a full-scale war in Europe would have seemed crazy, since secular European states in the 21st century seek to play up their “humanism” and mask their crimes. When they do engage in military operations, they do so somewhere far away from Europe. But when it comes to Russia, we have witnessed the occupation of Crimea and subsequent fake referendums, the war in Donbas, and the MH17 plane crash. Ukraine constantly experiences hacker attacks and bomb threats, not only in state buildings but also inside the schools and kindergartens.
\n\nIn Belarus in 2020, Lukashenka boldly declared himself the winner of the elections with a result of 80% of the vote. The uprising in Belarus even led to a strike of Belarusian propagandists. But after the landing of Russian FSB planes, the situation changed dramatically and the Belarusian government succeeded in violently suppressing the protests.
\n\nA similar scenario played out in Kazakhstan, but there, the regular armies of Russia, Belarus, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan were brought in to help the regime suppress the revolt as part of the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) cooperation.
\n\nRussian special services lured refugees from Syria to Belarus in order to create a conflict on the border with the European Union. A group of the Russian FSB was also uncovered that was engaged in political assassinations using chemical weapons—the already familiar “novichok.” In addition to the Skripals and Navalny, they have also killed other political figures in Russia. Putin’s regime responds to all accusations by saying “It’s not us, you all are lying.” Meanwhile, Putin himself wrote an article half a year ago in which he asserts that Russians and Ukrainians are one nation and should be together. Vladislav Surkov (a political strategist who builds Russian state policy, connected with the puppet governments in the so-called DNR and LNR) published an article declaring that “the empire must expand, otherwise it will perish.” In Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan over the past two years, the protest movement has been brutally suppressed and independent and opposition media are being destroyed. We recommend reading more about Russia’s activities here.
\n\nAll things considered, the likelihood of a full-scale war is high—and somewhat higher this year than last year. Even the sharpest analysts are unlikely to be able to predict exactly when it will start. Perhaps a revolution in Russia would relieve tension in the region; however, as we wrote above, the protest movement there has been smothered.
\n\nAnarchists in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia mostly support Ukrainian independence directly or implicitly. This is because, even with all the national hysteria, corruption, and a large number of Nazis, compared to Russia and the countries controlled by it, Ukraine looks like an island of freedom. This country retains such “unique phenomena” in the post-Soviet region as the replaceability of the president, a parliament that has more than nominal power, and the right to peaceful assembly; in some cases, factoring in additional attention from society, the courts sometimes even function according to their professed protocol. To say that this is preferable to the situation in Russia is not to say anything new. As Bakunin wrote, “We are firmly convinced that the most imperfect republic is a thousand times better than the most enlightened monarchy.”
\n\nThere are many problems inside Ukraine, but these problems are more likely to be solved without the intervention of Russia.
\n\nIs it worth it to fight the Russian troops in the case of an invasion? We believe that the answer is yes. The options that Ukrainian anarchists are considering at the present moment include joining the armed forces of Ukraine, engaging in territorial defense, partisanship, and volunteering.
\n\nUkraine is now at the forefront of the struggle against Russian imperialism. Russia has long-term plans to destroy democracy in Europe. We know that little attention has yet been paid to this danger in Europe. But if you follow the statements of high-profile politicians, far-right organizations, and authoritarian communists, over time, you will notice that there is already a large spy network in Europe. For example, some top officials, after leaving office, are given a position in a Russian oil company (Gerhard Schröder, François Fillon).
\n\nWe consider the slogans “Say No to War” or “The War of Empires” to be ineffectual and populist. The anarchist movement has no influence on the process, so such statements do not change anything at all.
\n\nOur position is based on the fact that we do not want to run away, we do not want to be hostages, and we do not want to be killed without a fight. You can look at Afghanistan and understand what “No to War” means: when the Taliban advances, people flee en masse, die in the chaos at the airports, and those who remain are purged. This describes what is happening in Crimea and you can imagine what will happen after the invasion of Russia in other regions of Ukraine.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/15/15.jpg\")
Afghanistan, 2021: People try to get on a NATO plane to escape the Taliban.
\nAs for the attitude towards NATO, the authors of this text are divided between two standpoints. Some of us have a positive approach towards this situation. It is obvious that Ukraine cannot counter Russia on its own. Even taking into consideration the large volunteer movement, modern technologies and weapons are needed. Apart from NATO, Ukraine has no other allies who can help with this.
\n\nHere, we can recall the story of Syrian Kurdistan. The locals were forced to cooperate with NATO against ISIS—the only alternative was to flee or be killed. We are well aware that support from NATO can disappear very quickly if the West develops new interests or manages to negotiate some compromises with Putin. Even now, the Self-Administration is forced to cooperate with the Assad regime, understanding that they don’t have much of an alternative.
\n\nA possible Russian invasion forces the Ukrainian people to look for allies in the fight against Moscow. Not on social media, but in the real world. Anarchists do not have sufficient resources in Ukraine or elsewhere to respond effectively to the invasion of Putin’s regime. Therefore, one has to think about accepting support from NATO.
\n\nThe other standpoint, which others in this writing group subscribe to, is that both NATO and the EU, in strengthening their influence in Ukraine, will cement the current system of “wild capitalism” in the country and make the potential for a social revolution even less feasible. In the system of global capitalism, the flagship of which is the USA as the leader of NATO, Ukraine is assigned the spot of a humble frontier: a supplier of cheap labor and resources. Therefore, it is important for Ukrainian society to realize the need for independence from all the imperialists. In the context of the country’s defense capability, the emphasis should not be on the importance of NATO technology and support for the regular army, but on the potential of society for grassroots guerrilla resistance.
\n\nWe consider this war primarily against Putin and the regimes under his control. In addition to the mundane motivation not to live under a dictatorship, we see potential in Ukrainian society, which is one of the most active, independent, and rebellious in the region. The long history of resistance of the people over the past thirty years is a solid proof of this. This gives us hope that the concepts of direct democracy have a fertile ground here.
\n\nThe outsider position during the Maidan and the war had a demoralizing effect on the movement. Outreach was hampered as Russian propaganda monopolized the word “anti-fascism.” Due to the presence of the symbols of the USSR among the pro-Russian militants, the attitude towards the word “communism” was extremely negative, so even the combination “anarcho-communism” was perceived negatively. The declarations against the pro-Ukrainian ultra-right cast a shadow of doubt on anarchists in the eyes of ordinary folks. There was an unspoken agreement that the ultra-right would not attack anarchists and anti-fascists if they did not display their symbols at rallies and the like. The right had a lot of weapons in their hands. This situation created a feeling of frustration; the police did not function well, so someone could easily be killed without consequences. For example, in 2015, the pro-Russian activist Oles Buzina was killed.
\n\nAll this encouraged anarchists to approach the matter more seriously.
\n\nA radical underground began to develop starting from 2016; news about radical actions started to appear. Radical anarchist resources appeared that explained how to buy weapons and how to make caches, as opposed to the old ones, which were limited only to Molotov cocktails.
\n\nIn the anarchist milieu, it has become acceptable to have legal weapons. Videos of anarchist training camps using firearms began to surface.
\n\nEchoes of these changes reached Russia and Belarus. In Russia, the FSB liquidated a network of anarchist groups that had legal weapons and practiced airsoft. The arrestees were tortured with electric current in order to force them to confess to terrorism, and sentenced to terms ranging from 6 to 18 years. In Belarus, during the 2020 protests, a rebellious group of anarchists under the name “Black Flag” was detained while trying to cross the Belarusian-Ukrainian border. They had a firearm and a grenade with them; according to the testimony of Igor Olinevich, he bought the weapon in Kyiv.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/15/16.jpg\")
Anarchist rebel group “Black Flag”
\nThe outdated approach of anarchists’ economic agenda has also changed: if before, the majority worked at low-paid jobs “closer to the oppressed,” now many are trying to find a job with a good salary, most often in the IT sector.
\n\nStreet anti-fascist groups have resumed their activities, engaging in retaliatory actions in cases of Nazi attacks. Among other things, they held the “No Surrender” tournament among antifa fighters and released a documentary entitled “Hoods,” which tells about the birth of the Kyiv antifa group. (English subtitles are available.)
\n\nAnti-fascism in Ukraine is an important front, because in addition to a large number of local ultra-right activists, many notorious Nazis have relocated here from Russia (including Sergei Korotkikh and Alexei Levkin) and from Europe (such as Denis “White Rex” Kapustin), and even from the USA (Robert Rando). Anarchists have been investigating the activities of the far right.
\n\nThere are activist groups of various kinds (classical anarchists, queer anarchists, anarcho-feminists, Food Not Bombs, eco-initiatives, and the like), as well as small information platforms. Recently, a politically charged anti-fascist resource has appeared in the telegram @uantifa, duplicating its publications in English.
\n\nToday, the tensions between groups are gradually smoothing out, as recently there have been many joint actions and common participation in social conflicts. Among the biggest of these is the campaign against the deportation of the Belarusian anarchist Aleksey Bolenkov (who managed to win a trial against the Ukrainian special services and remain in Ukraine) and the defense of one of the districts in Kyiv (Podil) from police raids and attacks by the ultra-right.
\n\nWe still have very little influence on society at large. This is largely because the very idea of a need for organization and anarchist structures was ignored or denied for a long time. (In his memoirs, Nestor Makhno also complained about this shortcoming after the defeat of the anarchists). Anarchist groups were very quickly dashed by the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine] or the far right.
\n\nNow we have come out of stagnation and are developing, and therefore we are anticipating new repression and new attempts by the SBU to take control of the movement.
\n\nAt this stage, our role can be described as the most radical approaches and views in the democratic camp. If liberals prefer to complain to the police in the event of an attack by the police or the far right, anarchists offer to cooperate with other groups that suffer from a similar problem and come to the defense of institutions or events if there is a possibility of an attack.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/02/15/17.jpg\")
\nAnarchists are now trying to create horizontal grassroots ties in society, based on common interests, so that communities can address their own needs, including self-defense. This differs significantly from ordinary Ukrainian political practice, in which it is often proposed to unite around organizations, representatives, or the police. Organizations and representatives are often bribed and the people who have gathered around them remain deceived. The police may, for example, defend LGBT events but get mad if these activists join a riot against police brutality. Actually, this is why we see potential in our ideas—but if a war breaks out, the main thing will again be the ability to participate in armed conflict.
\n\nFor further reading, you could start with Anarchist Fighter’s response to this article.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2022/01/06/january-6-first-as-farce-next-time-as-tragedy-what-if-we-knew-we-would-face-another-coup", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2022/01/06/january-6-first-as-farce-next-time-as-tragedy-what-if-we-knew-we-would-face-another-coup", "title": "January 6: First as Farce, Next Time as Tragedy? : What If We Knew We Would Face Another Coup?", "summary": "What if we knew that we would face the same situation that occurred on January 6, 2021, but with Trump and his supporters better prepared for it?", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/01/06/header-1.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/01/06/header-1.jpg", "date_published": "2022-01-06T20:16:49Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:52Z", "tags": [ "Trump", "fascism", "Coup", "anti-fascism", "DC" ], "content_html": "What if we knew that we would face the same situation that occurred on January 6 again, but with Trump and his supporters better prepared for it? How would we prepare?
\n\nThe year 2021 opened with the farcical culmination of the reactionary momentum that had been building throughout the second half of 2020: a bungled coup attempt intended to keep Donald Trump in office by brute force—or at least to normalize such stunts for the future. As with Trump’s election, we had noted the signs that this was on the way, but it still took us by surprise when it occurred. It was hard to believe Trump would burn all his political capital on such a long-shot attempt to stay in power.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1476530923827085319\n\n\n
In retrospect, once Trump was no longer going to get to remain president, he had no incentive not to try to carry out a coup, as far-fetched as his scheme was without a critical mass of government officials on board. In the year since, he has regained much of the ground it seemed that he had permanently lost, consolidating the majority of the Republican party around an agreement that what happened on January 6 was no big deal.
\n\nThe Democrats have fallen into the same error that Trump has lured them into time and again: they have been trying to investigate him. A year of small revelations about January 6, dribbling out one at a time, has served to kill the story by overexposure. Over the past four years, Trump has survived countless such revelations about his conduct. There’s no delegitimizing him with his base—the worse he is, the better, as far as they are concerned.
\n\nWe had already identified this phenomenon in 2018:
\n\n\n\n\nThere’s no need for new revelations about Trump’s overt racism, perpetration of sexual assault, or illicit dealings with other authoritarians. All of these are already flagrantly obvious. The focus on investigating him serves above all to re-legitimize the same FBI and justice system that are already being used against anyone who honestly sets out to interrupt the harm that both Trump and his centrist rivals are perpetuating through the institutions of the state.
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As we pointed out in 2019, all the investigating in the world will be worse than useless if the balance of power within the state remains such that it is impossible to impose consequences on Trump:
\n\n\n\n\nRank-and-file Democrats still don’t understand how power works. Crime is not the violation of the rules, but the stigma attached to those who break rules without the power to make them. (As they say, steal $25, go to jail; steal $25 million, go to Congress.) At the height of Genghis Khan’s reign, it would have been pointless to accuse the famous tyrant of breaking the laws of the Mongol Empire; as long as Trump has enough of Washington behind him, the same goes for him. Laws don’t exist in some transcendent realm. They are simply the product of power struggles among the elite—not to mention the passivity of the governed—and they are enforced according to the prevailing balance of power. To fetishize the law is to accept that might makes right.
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Lacking the political will to take action, the Democrats and their mouthpieces in the corporate media have settled for trying their case in the court of public opinion. Again, this is a profound failure to understand the situation. By their own account, their adversaries are rallying adherents to an explicitly anti-democratic program—and the Democrats’ only response is to attempt to use this talking point to gain an advantage in the next election.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/01/06/3.jpg\")
In the long run, Democrats may find that they are bringing a ballot to a gunfight. This photograph was taken at the pro-Trump rally in Washington, DC at the end of 2020, immediately preceding the gathering on January 6, 2021.
\nLet’s be very clear about this: if you believe that the Republicans are plotting to take power via undemocratic means, then limiting yourself to trying to outvote them is explicitly self-defeating. If the things that liberals are saying about January 6 are true—and there is reason to believe that they are—then it stands to reason that everyone who is concerned about this should be learning about direct action and anti-fascist means of community defense.
\n\nInstead, in a variety of ways, centrists have used the events of January 6 to direct people away from precisely the measures they should be taking, to delegitimize those measures and discredit the people with whom they might take them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2022/01/06/4.jpg\")
We can’t make this stuff up.
\nThe events of January 6 and the ensuing backlash and repression set the template for 2021, a dramatic lull following one of the largest waves of protest in United States history. Democrats took advantage of the opportunity to restore the battered prestige of law enforcement, depicting police officers as beleaguered guardians of democracy, and valorized snitching and surveillance as tactics via which ordinary citizens could join them in defending democracy. At the same time, they took steps to discredit direct action by associating it with pro-Trump “lawlessness.”
\n\nWhen police murdered George Floyd, public trust and respect for law enforcement plummeted to unprecedented depths. Demands to defund or even abolish the police migrated from the extreme political margins to become serious proposals that were widely debated in the mainstream. Fox News and its imitators continued their racially charged crime alarmism, but with diminishing returns; efforts by police unions, PR firms, and liberal corporate media outlets to feature stories of cops doing good made little headway against the widespread suspicion that had taken hold from the left all the way to the center.
\n\nIn this environment, the failed coup of January 6 was a godsend to the state. Police could pose as both victims and heroes again, the National Guard as saviors and bulwarks against chaos; even the Federal Bureau of Investigation was doing its part to protect democracy from right-wing thugs. Liberals and mainstream media outlets seized upon these interpretations and ran with them, with extraordinary success. The conviction of Derek Chauvin sidestepped one of the only circumstances that would have immediately catalyzed a new round of rioting while bringing courts and prosecutors into the circle of institutions that grateful liberals praised for holding the line. Pretty soon, ex-cop Eric Adams was on track to be the next mayor of New York City—and the new face of an aggressively amnesiac Democratic Party.
\n\nAll the while, police continued to murder people, again and again and again—protected not only by qualified immunity, but also by the discrediting of militant protest and the restoration of officers to the roles of martyrs and heroes.
\n\nAt the same time, government officials were carrying out a massive campaign—complete with billboards and bus stop advertisements—to crowdsource information with which to identify participants in the storming of the Capitol building, drawing the enthusiastic participation of thousands. This establishes a new precedent for sharing out the work of policing across the entire online population. Because the campaign is directed against right-wing extremists, it draws buy-in from the center and the left—considerably more so than the same approach did when it was directed against Muslims and other “suspicious” persons in the years following the attacks of September 11, 2001.
\n\nThose with long memories will recognize that these volunteer online forensics squads are descended from earlier groups that set out to identify members of the black bloc at various G20 summits, often in response to groundless conspiracy theories to the effect that the anarchists were actually police infiltrators seeking to discredit “legitimate” (read: legalistic) movements. The more normalized this kind of crowdsourcing becomes, the more we will see it used against us the next time we participate in protest activity that stands a chance to change the world.
\n\nCorporate media outlets, including those with a liberal slant, also expanded the range of intrusive technologies that they were willing to utilize in their coverage of January 6, mainstreaming the merging of doxxing and reporting that increasingly characterizes journalism today.
\n\nAll this occurred alongside the continued authorization of both state and right-wing vigilante violence against social movements, exemplified by Florida’s draconian anti-protest laws and Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal and subsequent elevation to Republican stardom. The embrace of Rittenhouse indicates that even if insurrections and coups are still too much for some Republicans to stomach, there is widespread support for lethal violence against any social movement that is perceived as a threat to law and order.
\n\nAcross party lines, the political class has sought to re-establish their monopoly over politics while suppressing grassroots mobilization and protest. For all their aggressive performance of partisan division, Republicans and Democrats are both relieved to see the locus of politics shift back from the streets to the well-defended halls of power. So long as the current state of affairs prevails, both parties benefit from the repression of protest across the board—be it protest from armed militias, anti-vaxxers, and Trump loyalists or Black Lives Matter advocates, water protectors, anti-fascists, and anarchists.
\n\nShould this state of affairs come to an end, the Republicans now have a plan B. The centrist Democrats, not so much.
\n\nAnd what about us? How should we navigate this situation, which is much less conducive to grassroots organizing than 2020 was? And how can we prepare for a possible future in which the locus of power shifts back to street action, but on the terms of the likes of Trump and his supporters?
\n\nThe centrists are currently ascendant, while the wings of the extreme right that are most connected to the storming of the Capitol—the Proud Boys and their compatriots—remain under intense scrutiny and in disarray, more or less discredited. However, they may not be the ones who will pose the chief risk to us in the next round.
\n\nThe evolution of right-wing politics in Greece over the past decade offers an instructive example for our situation in the US. Despite our anxieties a few years ago, the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party ultimately failed to gain electoral ground in Greece. The other political parties all united against them, portraying them as the illegitimate ones—the supposed opposite numbers of the uncontrollable anarchists. This enabled the old-fashioned conservative New Democracy party to snap up many Golden Dawn voters and win the next election running on a platform borrowed in part from Golden Dawn. New Democracy went on to implement many of Golden Dawn’s policy proposals—with grievous consequences for anarchists, immigrants, and others—without provoking any of the pushback that Golden Dawn would have received from the European Union and various elements of Greek “civil society” if it had won.
\n\nSimilarly, though the Proud Boys are in disarray, perhaps the chief risk is that their fascistic program will filter out into the Republican Party at large. If the reversals of January 6 enable the Republicans to weed out their lunatic fringe while radicalizing to the right as a whole—the same process via which the Nazi skinheads of the 1980s gave way to Richard Spencer—we could find ourselves in a dangerous situation indeed.
\n\nBiden’s grandfatherly normalcy has calmed the center and the left, elements of which took advantage of social movement exhaustion to rationalize going back to brunch. Anti-Biden outrage on the right, while extensive, has not reached anything like the vehemence directed against Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Yet the Biden administration’s unsurprising lack of success delivering on its promises has demoralized the center, paving the way for a Republican resurgence. Combined with the downturn in radical social movement activity, the situation appears similar to the second year of Obama’s presidency, when the lack of a substantive radical opposition was one of the factors contributing to the rise of the Tea Party and an emboldened grassroots right wing.
\n\nThis year will see the first election since Trump introduced the “stolen election” narrative into United States politics along with the revanchist program it implies. There will be considerable attention focused on voting procedures and further experiments to see if the “big lie” model can be used to undermine Democratic victories. At the same time, we can anticipate much lower voter turnouts and a great deal of indifference, without the fear of Trump or radical street action to goad either of the rival bases.
\n\nIn this context, there are many questions we should ask ourselves about what the next generation of street protests ought to look like. For the purposes of this reflection, though, we’ll end with a single one.
\n\nWhat if we knew that we would face the same situation that occurred on January 6 again, but with Trump and his supporters better prepared for it? How would we prepare?
\n\nLet’s go back to the afternoon of January 6, 2021. Anarchists were completely exhausted by the beginning of that January; a few tried to mobilize against the Trump rally scheduled in Washington, DC, but ultimately nothing came together. Liberals were arguing strenuously that it was better not to counter-protest the Trump rally, describing it as a trap. Consequently, thousands of Trump supporters showed up in DC, while the streets were virtually empty of anyone else.
\n\nUnless Trump was trying to reverse-psychologize us, this appears to have been exactly what he wanted:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/07/2.jpg\")
\nIn the end, things worked out well enough for anarchists and anti-fascists. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake, as the saying goes. Trump and his supporters overplayed their hand and suddenly found the rest of the political spectrum completely united against them.
\n\nBut what if Trump had been in a stronger position? What if he had been able to pull off a coup?
\n\nSome liberals have argued that it was essential that anti-fascists and anarchists and other participants in the Movement for Black Lives were not there on January 6, or else the National Guard would have focused on us and would never have gotten to the Capitol. According to the liberals, Trump was counting on us to be there, and it was our absence that sabotaged his plans.
\n\nIt’s possible that the liberals are correct here. We can’t rule it out—though it’s worth noting that liberals tend to glorify inaction just as aggressively as anarchists celebrate action, and usually having given less thought to the matter. In any case, counting on the state to hold the threat of fascism at bay leaves us in an extremely vulnerable position. It’s not unthinkable that at some point, a far-right coup will succeed, at least in some parts of the country, and we—not just anti-fascists, but all people of good conscience—will find that our concerted action is the only thing that stands between us and the establishment of an even more authoritarian society. That is precisely what happened in Spain in 1936.
\n\nThis is not just a hypothetical question about the past or the future. It’s chiefly a question about how we should be organizing today, what we should be preparing to be able to do.
\n\nThe embarrassing defeat of Trump’s supporters on January 6, despite all their tactical gear and ferocity, is a strong argument against a merely militaristic answer to this question.1 In the future, we’ll explore alternatives to the kind of ineffectual show of force that Trump and his supporters engaged in that day.
\n\nFor now, we leave you to confront this question, yourself—for it is the question facing all of us.
\n\nOn some level, the participants in the storming of the Capitol seem to have believed that they were doing what they thought “antifa” had been permitted to do, only more efficiently and effectively. To quote another analysis, “Years of obsessing about a cartoon caricature of ‘antifa’ led Trump’s most hardcore supporters to act out precisely the fantasy they were most afraid of others enacting. We should take care not to trade places with them.” ↩
\nIn the following analysis, anarchists in Brazil examine how the pandemic and rising far-right populism coincide in a colonial extraction economy, surveying a society headed for catastrophic collapse. In this context, self-organized mutual aid and collective defense projects involving delivery drivers, football fans, Indigenous organizers, squatters, residents of the favelas and the urban periphery, anti-fascists, and other targeted populations may indeed represent our only hope of survival.
\n\nLeia o texto em português aqui.
\n\n\n\n\n“History isn’t made by a handful of activists with the correct ideology, but through the unpredictable actions of countless proletarians learning to fight together against what they perceive (however inaccurately) to threaten their future. They come into these struggles with contradictory ideas, and these are only worked through in the material process of sustaining such movements and pushing them forward.”
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In dystopian literature and films in which a catastrophic event causes civilization to collapse, we often see humans living in groups afterwards, planning to “rebuild the lost world,” as if restoring that same social organization and economic structure that dragged them to collapse would be the answer to their misery. To these characters—and to their leaders with their epic speeches—the problem was not the normal functioning of the system, but its end. We see this in 28 Days Later (2002), Children of Men (2006), Dawn Planet of the Apes (2014), and several other films that flirt with our desires and fears about the possibilities that would follow a disaster with the potential to irreparably unsettle our way of life—be it a nuclear apocalypse, a deadly virus, or human infertility.
\n\nThe word “dés-astre,” from French, indicates detachment from celestial bodies—a disruption in our relationship with the cosmos, with our destiny. Many people can only imagine the end of capitalism as a disastrous event that would leave us desperate and astray, as in those dystopias: ruined cities, infertile soil, extreme pollution, endless wars, hunger, and, of course, deadly diseases spreading freely. Yet for those of us surviving the real world crises of disasters and pandemics caused by capitalism, normality is the problem. For us, crisis has already started and disaster—the real disaster—is for everything to continue as it is. Inequality, privatization, pollution, oppression, and violence do not represent a break with the normality of the system we live in; rather, they are the conditions of its continuation.
\n\nCapitalism isn’t the first unequal and brutal system in history. But it is the first to endanger lives worldwide so that a minority can prosper in a globally unified system. We struggle to understand it because it is the world we inhabit, the world that we share with the people we love, that we get our sustenance from—though at the expense of much suffering. In this world, tragedies are unequally distributed, to say the least: a dozen billionaires continue to determine our futures, our lives and our deaths, as they control and benefit from the majority of our planet’s resources. The rest of us compete for jobs that are becoming more and more precarious, struggling to hold on to our homes, to survive racist police—not to end up in the crowded hospitals, refrigerated trucks, or mass graves that constitute the new stage set of the pandemic.
\n\n“While hundreds of thousands of people fall victim to COVID-19 throughout the territory occupied by the Brazilian state, Bolsonaro is using Trump’s playbook to consolidate control: spreading propaganda about electoral fraud, arming his supporters, and seeking to gain more leverage over the police. How do we stop him?”
\nWe must be done with the idea that the death of capitalism is the death of something that bears life. Capitalism is what is threatening our survival, imposing artificial competition within artificial scarcity. Even fiction authors are increasingly incapable of depicting the future as progress or a promise of “better days.” There are enough resources, food, and land for all people, but those who control them would rather destroy them than share with us. A social organization that launches satellites to explore galaxies but cannot feed the earthly population, that produces advanced medicine but intentionally renders it inaccessible to most people, is a social organization that will inevitably bring about its own collapse. We will not stop repeating: the true disaster is not the end of capitalism, but its continuation.
\n\nScientists and official institutions like the World Health Organization are taking from environmentalist and anti-capitalist movements the “alarmist” role of announcing the global crises caused by untrammeled economic expansion. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) declared that we’re steadily approaching a catastrophic rise in the temperature of the Earth, with a maximum of twelve years to stop this process. At the beginning of the 2019, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released a report showing that at least one million species will vanish from our planet’s surface in the coming decades—this includes a great deal of familiar flora and fauna, and also insects and micro-organisms that are necessary for the agriculture that feeds all of us. In August 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, scientists from around the world published the State of the Climate 2019 report, warning that this decade has been the hottest on record. In his 2016 book Big Farms Make Big Flu, Rob Wallace had already pointed out the concrete connections between capitalism, industry, agribusiness, and epidemiological outbreaks like the one in which we live now.
\n\nAmid all this tragedy, we see that left-wing governments in the Americas and around the world are unable to contain the rise of populism. They could not refrain from corruption; they failed to fulfill their promises to “include the excluded” while protecting the privileges of the rich and the frail comfort of the so-called “middle class”—a stratum that generally identifies with the desires and ideologies of the ruling class. This is not a matter of moral judgment, but an indication that corruption is inherent in all states and capitalism, as both serve to maintain the division between those who control and those who obey, those who flaunt and those who starve. Left governments have been driven out by elections or coups led by the far right, which assume different forms in each country—whether populist, fascist, or authoritarian—but capture generalized dissatisfaction and disappointment on a global level.
\n\nDemocracy keeps swinging back and forth like a pendulum, taking power from the left to give to the right and back again without any change in the political and economic structure. For each Lula or Dilma who fails to pacify rebellion by means of concessions and increased investment in repressive apparatuses and laws, new Bolsonaros and Trumps appear, ready to double down and declare themselves the new leaders who “rebel within the order” and defy the limits of democracy, stretching them to the border of totalitarianism. In this respect, we could say that the ones who call for a reactionary “revolution” today are the extreme right, while the left wallows in attempts to preserve the paltry economic, political, and social advances they used to appease us long ago, while governing to manage our misery.
\n\nWe see the result from Brazil and the United States to Russia, Hungary, and India: new populist autocrats who subvert their own laws with impunity, leading governments that mire their populations in the deadly tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic. The only thing worse than living in a society in which petty leaders monopolize all the power and resources to impose decisions on our lives and our health is living in a society in which those leaders use their concentrated powers to let sickness and death stalk us without hindrance.
\n\nAs we compose this text, Brazil is burying 240,000 of the 2.5 million people killed around the world and is home to over 10 million cases of infection according to official data. The coronavirus crisis is the most faithful portrait of a predictable and preventable global disaster.
\n\nThe worst pandemic in over a century is not “pedagogical,” not a message from Gaia, not a divine punishment. But it is also not unrelated to human action across the world, like the meteor in the film Armageddon (1998) or the planet en route to collision with the Earth in Melancholia (2011). It is the direct result of the advance of capitalism, agribusiness and urbanization over biomes and wildlife. It is the material, political and subjective effect of an event yet to be elaborated.
\n\nWe now seem to be closer to The Turin Horse (2011) by Bela Tarr, for whom the end of the world is at the same time both strange and routine, monotonous in a life reduced to survival—the slow cancellation of the future.
\n\n\n\n\n“The way I see the end of the world is very simple, very quiet, without any spectacle, without fireworks, without apocalypse. It goes down until it gets weaker and weaker and in the end, it ends.”
\n\n-Bela Tarr
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It no longer seems possible—or even preferable—to postpone the end. It is already here. The big question now is how to deal with an ending that does not precipitate itself as a revolution but as a perpetual crisis. We start by setting out for another end of the world in the midst of the disaster. It is only by beginning there that we can act.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/28.jpg\")
Disinfecting a shopping mall in Caxias do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul.
\n\n\n\n“I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation. It is the slavery of other men that sets up a barrier to my freedom, or what amounts to the same thing, it is their bestiality which is the negation of my humanity. For my dignity as a man, my human right which consists of refusing to obey any other man, and to determine my own acts in conformity with my convictions is reflected by the equally free conscience of all and confirmed by the consent of all humanity. My personal freedom, confirmed by the liberty of all, extends to infinity.”
\n\n–Mikhail Bakunin, “Man, Society, and Freedom”
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In May 2020, asked about limiting the economy and putting rules for social distancing into practice, Bolsonaro compared Brazil to Sweden, saying that the Nordic country “didn’t stop,” representing a good example of a country that kept its “normality” in the face of the pandemic. Brazil had 13,000 deaths from the coronavirus by then, and Sweden just over three thousand.
\n\nComparing these two countries might seem ludicrous, considering that the Swedish population is 21 times smaller than the Brazilian, in fact smaller than the 12 million people who live in the city of São Paulo. Besides, the 10 million Swedes are well-supported by state welfare and social and economic inclusion the likes of which most of the 210 million Brazilians can’t even dream of. We don’t want to pay any naïve compliments to the Nordic capitalist model, which might be better described as “the world’s biggest gated community.” The existence of these global “condominiums” in the Swedens and Norways of the world necessitates the global margins in Latin America, Africa, and Asia that serve as cheap labor reserves, natural resource extraction zones, and garbage dumps with conveniently loose regulations. This helps explain why Brazil is incapable of controlling the pandemic and its effects, despite having the largest public health system in the world, exacerbating longstanding inequalities and forms of exclusion.
\n\nBrazil is a nation of continental dimensions with a substantial production economy. However, it is still characterized by profound social inequality and a compliant role in the global market as a producer and exporter of agricultural and primary products such as grain, minerals, and oil. Fully 14 of the top 15 exports are primary. Abounding in various biomes, water, and arable land, food production on Brazilian soil is the third largest in the world, feeding 1.5 billion people worldwide. But this economy treats forests, rivers, soil, and all human and animal lives as nothing more than sources of income in the external market. It is based on individual property, concentration of wealth and land, deforestation, pollution, violence, enslaved labor, and the appropriation of Indigenous lands—a process that has not slowed since the European invasion in 1500, not even during the pandemic.
\n\nWhile Bolsonaro exhorts Brazilians to pretend to be Swedish, a considerable part of the population lacks access to water or sewage treatment, or even to the documents needed to apply for those services. For 35 million Brazilians, ordinary sanitation is not even possible, as there is no access to clean water. Almost 100 million people—47% of the Brazilian population—have no access to a sewage system. Unlike Sweden, where the government subsidized 90% of wages to keep people at home, approximately 46 million Brazilians in 2020 were living without any documents, bank account, or internet access, invisible to the eyes of the state and excluded from receiving emergency aid—which amounts to just over half of the Brazilian minimum wage, but four times more than the minimum of Lula’s celebrated Bolsa Familia aid. This exclusion is directly reflected in statistics about the impact of COVID-19, just as it affects those same people in the “normal” times, whether by misery or by the violence that comes along with it.
\n\nThe disastrous scene of the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil would not be set without the permanent state of calamity imposed by security forces. In Rio de Janeiro, for example, even with businesses closed and stay-home recommendations, murders by police rose 43% in April, the first month of lockdown and quarantine. Among the 177 people killed by Rio de Janeiro police in April 2020 were 14-year-old João Pedro, shot at home by police, and 18-year-old João Vitor, killed by police while social movement groups delivered boxes of food in Cidade de Deus. After the STF (Brazilian Federal Supreme Court) prohibited police operations during the pandemic on June 5, deaths dropped 70% throughout the entire city. Rafaela Coutinho, João Pedro’s mother, summarized the situation thus: “I was protecting João Pedro from a virus and he was a victim of an even more dreadful virus: the virus of a murdering state.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/17.jpg\")
“Black lives and lives from the favelas matter”: A protest against police violence and racism in Rio de Janeiro, May 2020.
\nEnvironmental devastation, seizures of Indigenous land, police murders, the political persecution of educators—crises don’t ever come alone. Furthermore, they often become opportunities to get certain measures passed, measures that would draw much more attention—or resistance—in other times. The current environment minister stated on video that the pandemic was an opportune moment to pass laws facilitating environmental degradation, “while the media only covers COVID.” Indeed, we have seen rapid legal measures to dismantle environmental protection legislation. The halt of inspections during the pandemic and isolation period allowed cattle ranchers, timber merchants, and miners to penetrate further into the Amazon and Pantanal forests, causing a 28% increase in fires compared to last year.
\n\nAt the same time, Indigenous and quilombolas movements and groups denounced Bolsonaro’s government for putting into practice a “genocidal plan to clear the area” by permitting COVID-19 to reach communities that lack the bare minimum to resist. Even STF minister Gilmar Mendes used the word “genocide” to describe the politics of this president who vetoed measures to increase access to potable water, hygiene supplies, internet connection, and educational supplies about disease prevention in Indigenous languages in July. Bolsonaro also vetoed a measure affirming the state’s obligation to provide medical treatment to Indigenous peoples. Before the end of July, 70 thousand Indigenous people had been infected and more than 2000 had died of COVID-19 across the Americas. In the 21st century, this is the new face of a colonial project that, when it doesn’t strike Indigenous peoples directly with weapons, once more employs diseases and neglect to kill off individuals and exterminate entire communities—whether it be the Chilean state against the Mapuche people in the Araucania region or the Brazilian state against the Guarani-Kaiowa in Mato Grosso do Sul.
\n\nState surveillance measures now include innovative methods such as phone monitoring, facial recognition, and thermal camera control. We have not yet experienced such intense surveillance as the completely locked down neighborhoods in Madrid, or robots monitoring people in the streets as in Tunis, or individual phone monitoring and facial recognition tracking citizens as in China. But wherever state control gets a foothold, it can only intensify.
\n\nIsolation measures and police intervention to suppress meetings and gatherings remind us of the years of the military dictatorship (1964-1985), when there were curfews and any meeting of more than two people, however casual, was disbanded by police as potentially conspiratorial. For those who remember that time—or who still experience the police and military state in the outskirts of the cities or in rural areas—such measures always take the form of hostile enforcement, even if they are “for everyone’s health.” The classic example of why such measures can arouse people’s fury is the well-known “Revolta da Vacina” (Vaccine Revolt) of 1904, when the government of Rio de Janeiro—Brazil’s capital at the time—imposed a vaccination plan to fight smallpox by force, with cops breaking into people’s houses to make them take the vaccine. At the same time, a violent hygiene urbanization project demolished whole streets and forced the poor to move to the outskirts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/21.jpg\")
A tram overturned in Rio de Janeiro during the Vaccine Uprising of 1904.
\nToday, such revolts are not necessarily directed against science, medicine, or the preservation of health, but against authoritarianism and the power of those who aim to force us to accept their decisions without dialogue as a way to suppress self-organization. For example, in 2019, the governor of São Paulo, João Dória of the PSDB, re-enacted the 2014 law prohibiting masks in demonstrations in order to prevent black blocs. A year later, the same governor mandated the use of masks across the state for all people who go out to the streets for any purpose. This irony illustrates how vulnerable and alienated we are from our agency when we count on politicians and laws to determine what is best or safest for us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/12.jpg\")
Doria, the governor of São Paulo, prohibited masks in 2019 and made them mandatory in 2020.
\nIt is difficult to implement remote learning where students do not have a computer or Internet access or live with several family members in dwellings of one or two rooms. The pandemic has only exacerbated the tremendous inequalities between students from public and private schools. The rise in domestic violence during the lockdowns has shed some light on patriarchy and sexism in our society. Prison revolts protesting the violation of human rights and carelessness with which prison officials permit COVID-19 to spread show the brutality of an overcrowded and murderous prison system. The new dangers threatening the lives of people in the countryside, Indigenous peoples, and the elderly reveal the social exclusion these groups have already been subjected to for centuries.
\n\nThe pandemic is no different from other disasters that disproportionately affect the poor and excluded. When winter or a storm hits a city and homeless people die of cold and houses built in high-risk areas collapse, it is obvious that the problem is not the cold or rain, but that people are left without the basic resources they need to face those situations. As long as capitalism persists, the people at the bottom of the pyramid will always suffer the most in any crisis or catastrophe. Like the tragedies before it, this health crisis has an age, but also a color and an address: in April, the number of Black people killed by COVID-19 in Brazil was already five times higher than the number of white casualties. Recent studies indicate that, in São Paulo, housewives, self-employed professionals, and people using public transportation are the chief victims of the pandemic, while employers have almost no chance of infection.
\n\nAs some of the anarchists who fought the cholera epidemic in Italy in 1884 put it, “The true cause of cholera is poverty, and the true medicine to prevent its return can be nothing less than social revolution.” With just a few adjustments, we can say the same thing about our situation in the 21st century. The geopolitical disparities—Brazil feeds 20% of the planet, but does not guarantee basic resources, such as water and sewage, to almost 50% of its population—prove that the problem is not scarcity of resources, but the concentration of all land, money, infrastructure, and power in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The problem with capitalism is distribution, and the cause is the very logic of its economics and politics.
\n\nIf the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us anything, it is that capitalism is full of bottlenecks that block access to resources. A crisis that threatens the health of all people on all continents, exposing the poorest and most vulnerable to preventable deaths—and by endangering them, enabling the virus to continue spreading and threatening others as well—confirms that this economic system is unable to sustain everyone. As Bakunin1 might have put it, my health depends on the health of everyone else, everywhere on the planet. Anarchists and other radicals have always held that freedom must be for everyone if anyone is to be truly free. This pandemic confirms that, while some lack freedom, while some lack equal access to resources and the autonomy to cooperate and support each other, a single sick person poses a risk to everyone’s health. Until we destroy these lines of exclusion, we will all be at risk.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/13.jpg\")
A gravedigger in a section of Caju Cemetery exclusively for victims of COVID-19 in Rio de Janeiro, May 14, 2020.
\n\n\n\n“Professional politicians, seeing that they are losing ground, because the state falters with capitalism, become professional bandits to continue in the same positions of power and the assault on the public purse. Primitive expeditions arise. It is fascism.”
\n\n–Maria Lacerda de Moura, “Fascismo: Filho Dileto da Igreja e do Capital,” 1934
\n
The 2013 uprisings in Brazil shook up the fragile stability built by the PT government, showing that popular unrest could not be pacified by class conciliation. Democracy does not represent anyone or anything other than the interests of the elites, and when the population reaches the limits that democracy imposes on their ability to meet their needs and make their voices heard, the burning streets become their channel of expression once more.
\n\nMovements for free transportation, such as the MPL (Movimento Passe Livre), continued the tradition of the autonomous movements that emerged at the turn of the century; their constant organizing for over a decade was fundamental to the revolt that broke out in 2013. That revolt escaped any form of control, whether from the movements themselves or from traditional parties, unions, or organizations. But when these autonomous and anti-capitalist groups were effectively repressed by the PT government, the right wing took advantage of the situation to gain prominence in street demonstrations and on the Internet.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/23.jpg\")
The “bacillus of the plague” in Brasilia, March 15, 2015.
\nAt the end of 2014, the PT won its fourth consecutive election, Dilma Rousseff’s second victory. Defeated, the candidate of the PSDB [Brazilian Social Democracy Party], the country’s second largest party, called for one of the first protests under the slogans “Fora Dilma” (“Dilma out!”) and “in defense of democracy,” helping to catalyze the massive protests for the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff that took place over the following years. Without an opportunity to win an election, the conservative parties organized their representatives in parliament, widely supported by the media and the business elite. In 2016, they managed to push through an impeachment that ended 13 years of PT governments. Michel Temer of the PMDB (now MDB—Brazilian Democratic Movement) took over.
\n\nTemer’s government pursued its conservative agenda, accelerating the neoliberal project that was already underway under the PT. Temer, too, encountered a lot of popular resistance: building occupations against the dissolution of the Ministry of Culture, the occupations of more than a thousand schools and a hundred universities, violent demonstrations and confrontations in Brasilia against the budget freeze on health and education in 2016, calls for a general strike in 2017, and a major demonstration that took over the center of the country’s capital and ended with the burnings of two ministries. All of these were important episodes of struggle and resistance that pushed back against the state, but they did not slow the growth of the right wing on the streets.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/25.jpg\")
Protesters occupying Paraná State College against Temer’s PEC 241 in 2016.
\nOn the eve of the 2018 presidential election, protests from the #EleNão (“Not Him”) campaign, organized chiefly by women’s movements against Bolsonaro, showed that thousands of people were still willing to demonstrate on the streets. But they were unable to radicalize their actions and agendas the way the movements of 2013 had, or to compromise Bolsonaro’s victory at the polls.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/22.jpg\")
“Ele Não”(Not Him”): feminist movements gather thousands in São Paulo against Bolsonaro’s election in 2018.
\nIn other words, it wasn’t just the autonomous movements that gained momentum; reactionaries also learned how to recruit more and more people on the streets. When the mainstream left fled the popular uprising of 2013 to continue chasing state power and control, the result was that the right was able to present itself as an electoral solution to the bankruptcy of the democratic system itself. Bolsonaro won the 2018 presidential election because he understood better than much of the left that the model of representative democracy was worn out. Fascism is fueled by the state reaction against popular revolts.
\n\nBolsonaro defeated the PT with 55% of the vote in the second round. But before that, in the first round, polarization crushed the PSDB, the PT’s biggest rival and the main party representing the Brazilian neoliberal right since the end of the dictatorship. The party that ruled for two consecutive terms before the PT got a measly 4% of the vote in the 2018 election. The effects of polarization and radicalization promoted by right-wing movements imposed profound changes on the political landscape in the country, putting Bolsonaro’s personality in place of an entire party as the pole alternative to the PT.
\n\nThe worst of the effects of Bolsonarism were yet to come. As the Italian anarchist Malatesta warned, the Spanish militant Durruti demonstrated, and the Brazilian anarchist Maria Lacerda de Moura confirmed, every elite and every government keeps fascism as a weapon always within arm’s reach to contain or prevent the advances of the working class. In times of economic and political crisis, fascistic personalities and programs can seduce the elites and the electorate with the promise of a solution. The new populist wave that we see around the world today represents this strategy. Even though they are not technically fascists—or currently lack the capacity to be—politicians like Bolsonaro engage fascist dynamics by channeling the resentment of the middle classes and their desire to regain control of the state into hatred of minorities and what few rights they have won. Neo-Nazi cells and websites have increased considerably since Bolsonaro’s election. The more offensive, racist, and sexist they are, the more successful they have been engaging people in their campaigns. In this context, the internet has been fundamental in deepening the polarization between a left reduced to focusing on the electoral competition between Lula’s PT against Bolsonaro, on the one side, and the conservative, evangelical, and neo-liberal movements that supported Bolsonaro on the other.
\n\nA year after the election, Bolsonaro was expelled from his party. He remains the only president without a party in Brazilian history. After using the Internet to win the election, Bolsonaro continued to govern by using it as a stage, becoming the first president to make announcements through weekly livestreams on Facebook. Like Trump, Bolsonaro maintained the warlike tone of a man waging an eternal electoral campaign even after victory, heralding his project of management by destruction.
\n\nBut it’s not just the Internet, television, and the use of bots in social media. Bolsonaro’s political career is over three decades old; his whole family has deep ties to the militias that control part of the organized crime market in Rio de Janeiro. His three sons, who all have careers as parliamentarians, have employed militiamen and their relatives in their offices, including the known murderer Adriano da Nóbrega. Da Nóbrega received a medal from Flávio Bolsonaro in parliament; his imprisoned militia colleagues were accused of murdering councilwoman Marielle Franco. One of these colleagues was a neighbor of Jair Bolsonaro’s family, living in the same elite condominium.
\n\nThese milícias or milicianos are common in the state of Rio de Janeiro: paramilitary groups of police, ex-policemen, firefighters and security agents who take the place of criminal organizations to sell “security services” to residents and merchants and to monopolize illegal private transportation companies along with access to real estate, Internet connection, electricity, and other resources. These groups have their origins in the death squads that emerged in the 1960s to act as hired killers under the military dictatorship. By the 1980s, these groups already dominated several sectors, consolidated by terror and, over the following decade, the connivance of elected councilors, deputies, and mayors in several cities in Rio. They do not only operate “where the state does not reach”—rather, they represent a symbiosis of organized crime with the state. Whatever corruption emerged from the 14 years of PT governments cannot compare to 50 years of these groups’ activity—which helped the Bolsonaro family secure their positions as parliamentarians and Jair Bolsonaro as president.
\n\nCombining distorted military doctrines, obscurantism mixed with an ultra-neoliberal agenda, and campaign strategies imported from Steve Bannon and his cronies, Bolsonaro introduced a new way of governing—governing to destroy—lowering Brazilian democracy to levels similar to those of 1964. The Secretary of Culture has quoted Joseph Goebbels in a TV address, among several other allusions to the Nazi regime. Bolsonaro is a strong competitor in the field of global populism, and Brazil is the best candidate to be the new epicenter of this lethal virus and its death cult.
\n\nIt is not surprising that a president who defends the military dictatorship, torture, and death squads and maintains close family relations with the militias treats a health crisis that kills hundreds of thousands with total indifference. When the pandemic hit Brazil, Bolsonaro followed the same script as his master, Donald Trump. First, he downplayed the risks of the disease and contradicted scientists and health institutions; then, he opposed the closing of businesses and other lockdown measures, refusing to work with other elements of the government or to release funds to the states and cities to contain the disease. When asked about the number of deaths, he shocked public opinion with responses like “So what?” and “I am not an grave-digger.” At a time when the severity of the pandemic was undeniable, he promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine as a miracle drug, just like his idol in the USA. His government proposed a R $200.00 monthly allowance for unemployed workers or workers unable to work informally during the isolation period—and then when left-wing parliamentarians approved a new R $600.00 proposal, Bolsonaro took credit for it, gaining popularity among Brazil’s poorest groups and regions. In August 2020, with 3.5 million people infected, Bolsonaro continued to spread disinformation alleging that “the majority of the population is immune to the coronavirus.” Regarding the deaths of over 100,000 people, he said “Let’s move on with life.”
\n\nIn other decades, statesmen facing a pandemic would make empty speeches to the effect that protecting the population is the top priority. Today, we see far-right populist leaders who are proud to speak with “authenticity,” stupidity “without filters” and “without demagogy.” Leaders like Bolsonaro and Trump break with the decorum previously expected of those in office or in the media. They openly proclaim their ignorance about specific fields of economic management (“I am not an economist!”) or pander to their base with racist, misogynist and classist vulgarities. To embody this air of “novelty,” “anti-system,” and “authenticity” is to venture where not even the greatest political figures on the left or right go.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/14.jpg\")
Graves at the Vila Formosa Cemetery in São Paulo, the largest in Latin America.
\nAlongside threats to send troops to close the Supreme Court and other sensationalist statements, while other governments introduced forced lockdowns and martial law, the federal government of Brazil organized its own version of extremism, permitting death on a genocidal scale. This is not just a matter of ignoring science, but rather of using scientific management to implement targeted eugenics and genocide. In accepting that 70% of the population would “inevitably” contract COVID-19, Bolsonaro and his government have risked up to two million casualties, chiefly from among those who are already at risk due to class, age, gender, ethnicity, and locality.
\n\nIn the face of this, movements for social transformation must show what it means to be truly rebellious, reclaiming tools for struggle that have been appropriated and distorted by our enemies. Populist bases are rejecting institutions that, at the turn of the century, only anti-capitalists dared to question. A slogan from the anti-globalization movements, “hate the media? Be the media,” has been corrupted into a right-wing version based in discounting verifiable facts and spreading false information to achieve political objectives. Challenging the way that pharmaceutical conglomerates monopolize the field of science is no longer a step towards increasing popular access to knowledge, but a means to promote potentially lethal obscurantism. Now the ones seeking to subvert political institutions are not self-organized political initiatives, but those who aim to establish a form of government based on rumors and authoritarianism.
\n\nWhen we imagine a future beyond capitalist democracy, we must picture a social revolution and the end of social classes, implying a permanent confrontation with all hierarchies—not just the obviously authoritarian figures like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Orbán. The alternative will be an even more brutal and unequal state kneeling on our necks forever as we struggle to breathe.
\n\n\n\n\n“…the progressive statist recomposition was a step backwards. A setback. For those who bet on collective emancipation, the reference point must always be the highest level reached by social struggle, and never what it is possible to achieve. The possible is always the State, the party, the existing institutions. But emancipation cannot stop there.”
\n\n–Raul Zibechi e Decio Machado, Os Limites do Progressismo
\n
\n\n\n“History forgets the moderates.”
\n\n–Andrew Bird
\n
Since the 2018 elections, people and social movements have wondered what form radical resistance to the government of Jair Bolsonaro would take. How can we resist an enemy that seems to transform all controversy into momentum and all resistance into a pretext for further repression? How can we mobilize an opposition that is not incapacitated by a pacifying and conciliatory left that has become accustomed to state management, seeing popular revolt as a threat to the order that they identify with? A few episodes have shown that many people are willing to take the first step—for example, in 2019, when anti-fascists clashed with groups celebrating the anniversary of the 1964 military coup.
\n\nDuring the first months of the pandemic, the best answers emerged in the daily activities of social movements, anti-fascists, and organized soccer fans who confronted and blocked pro-government street actions, couriers who organized unprecedented strikes across the country, and residents of favelas and occupations who organized solidarity actions. We see a promising model in these examples of mutual aid between poor and excluded people and of direct action confronting the reigning order and those who support it. Such struggles did not limit themselves to what politicians deem possible—which is simply the catastrophic management of the disaster. They did not wait, but dealt with the situation, refusing be paralyzed. This is what we are betting on.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/27.jpg\")
“Bolsonaro out—We are the resistance!” Anti-fascists in Porto Alegre, May 17, 2020.
\n\n\n\n“Without the hierarchical, hegemonic nature of the state, which monopolizes the use of force, the economy, official ideology, information, and culture; without the omnipresent security apparatuses that penetrate all aspects of life, from the media to the bedroom; without the disciplinary hand of the state as God on Earth, no system of exploitation or violence could survive.”
\n\n–Dilar Dirik, Radical Democracy: The First Line Against Fascism
\n
The anti-fascist struggle that emerged in the media and in the agendas of these movements had not been seen in Brazil for decades; there was widespread coverage of protests, but also threats of criminalization and repression. Starting in 2015, the right wing expanded their street presence with marches on Sundays to demand the impeachment of the PT, and then, in 2018, to elect Bolsonaro. After the election, right-wing groups revised this model again, staging “protests” in favor of the government. They organized these on weekends so as not to hinder the flow of vehicles and commerce on weekdays—the opposite of the anti-capitalist movements that organize with the aim of paralyzing urban circulation during the rush hour in the middle of the week.
\n\nThis was not a triumph of grassroots right-wing organizing; rather, it was built with the direct support of police and security agencies. Military police files leaked to the press showed that the police command treats pro-government demonstrations as harmless, praising them even when they violate health measures like the mandate to wear masks. Although it is unconstitutional to discriminate against political demonstrations on an ideological basis, linking certain organizations and even political parties to crimes such as vandalism, police did not even monitor the actions of the right, while opposition protests were classified as a “threat to order” and forcefully repressed. Once again, we see the lines of exclusion at work in the way that repression is concentrated on popular demonstrations of the left, peripheral, Black, and poor majority, while police officers escort, protect, and take photos with the mostly white Bolsonaro supporters from upscale neighborhoods driving caravans of luxury vehicles. The state seeks to determine which political actions will gain space on the streets and which will be crushed.
\n\nDefying this, football fans and precarious workers organized several public demonstrations in 2020. On May 3 and 17, anti-fascists in Porto Alegre interrupted Bolsonarist protests calling for the return of the military dictatorship, chanting “Step Back, Fascists.” These were some of the first demonstrations of the year—and after many months—to challenge Bolsonarist hegemony on the streets.
\n\nAs elsewhere in the world, the media debated whether it was “essential” to meet in public spaces to confront demonstrations in support of Bolsonaro and for the reopening of businesses. Bosses and pundits see no problem in crowding us onto buses, into queues, into the precarious workplaces and delivery service jobs that have been expanding while we suffer from the virus and privation—so we consider it necessary to get together to block the defenders of this murderous economic system and the circulation of labor for production and goods for consumption.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/18.jpg\")
Soccer fans at Av. Paulista in São Paulo, on May 31, 2020.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/6.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/11.jpg\")
An app delivery worker joins front-line protests against police repression.
\nOn May 9, about 70 Corinthians fans in the city of São Paulo organized a small action at the same time and place as a pro-government rally. The action blocked the Bolsonarista protest; along with images of something similar happening in Porto Alegre on May 17, this drew attention on social media and brought more people out into the street. Fans of different football teams took to the streets in São Paulo to thwart protests by supporters of the president on May 31, the day that these actions spread to a national scale. Fans of Gaviões da Fiel, one of the biggest groups in the country, with a political history dating from the worst years of the dictatorship, called for demonstrations with rival fan groups such as Palmeiras, São Paulo, and Santos. This moment of unity between different football clubs and other anti-fascist groups drew a crowd almost ten times bigger than the Bolsonarista side. The police tried to form lines to keep them isolated, but a clash took place when anti-fascists responded to provocations from protesters carrying US flags and flags from the Ukrainian neo-Nazi group Pravy Sektor. The police intervened, attacking anti-fascists and protecting the neo-Nazis on Paulista Avenue. Anti-fascists resisted, erecting barricades and blocking roads for a long time.
\n\nThe scenes reverberated across the country, especially a photo of a gig economy delivery worker throwing stones at the police. Under the slogan “Somos Democracia” (“We are Democracy”), chanted by many participants, this example of a combative and organized opposition spread. The wave of revolts that spread across the United States after the assassination of George Floyd on May 25 further strengthened the anti-racist protests in Brazil. The barricades that appeared on May 31 showed that the fights against racism, governments that flirt with fascism, and their repressive lackeys are fundamentally the same from the north to south of the globe.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Antimdia1/status/1267870123039305731\n\n\n
This tweet shows anti-fascists in São Paulo facing nationalists with Ukrainian neo-Nazi symbols and United States flags. The Military Police are protecting the nationalists.
\n\nAltogether, more than 15 cities saw protests on May 31. In Rio de Janeiro, anarchists and anti-fascists showed up to confront a pro-Bolsonaro action in Copacabana, and a physical confrontation ensued between anti-fascists and nationalists. In Belo Horizonte, the actions also began with small calls and became large demonstrations. In many cases, it was possible to block, delay, or even prevent caravans supporting Bolsonaro and demanding the reopening of business. The soccer members of Resistência Alvinegra made the first call for a rally in Praça do Papa; the weekly demonstrations that started with a dozen became thousands of people on May 31 and June 7, with many supporters and social movements marching to block the right-wing caravans, carrying anti-fascist flags and songs, honoring George Floyd and also João Vitor and Rodrigo Ciqueira who had been murdered by police in Rio de Janeiro, as well as councilor and black-feminist militant Marielle Franco, who was murdered in 2018 by militiamen.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/15.jpg\")
Belo Horizonte, May 31.
\nIn the following weeks, more cities joined these protests. In Salvador, the wave of protests in Brazil and the US inspired groups including Reação Antifascista Salvador, organized football clubs, labor unions, and Quilombos to organize a mass demonstration on June 7. In Curitiba, a demonstration including a massive anti-fascist turnout marched through the city center on June 1, burned the gigantic national flag in front of the government palace, and clashed with police.
\n\nDespite all their problems and internal conflicts, football clubs possess an enormous capacity to mobilize people and open dialogue between different sectors of society. We see this in the recent example of organized football fans in Chile joining the front lines to defend the 2019 protests. In 2013, the occupation in defense of Gezi Park in Istanbul, Turkey also drew fans who left internal rivalries aside to defend the park and the people occupying Taksim Square. In his Antifa Handbook, Mark Bray argues that “some of the most ferocious anti-fascist conflicts have happened in the context of football.” This tradition goes back to the 1970s, when fascist groups used football clubs and games as a venue to recruit new members and anti-fascists responded to prevent this.
\n\nUnfortunately, the protests dwindled, especially in São Paulo, the city with the biggest football organizations participating. After the clashes of May 31, the state government and police officials tried to mediate between anti-fascists and the organizers of pro-government rallies so that they would not organize protests at the same time on Paulista Avenue again. Movements like the “Povo Sem Medo,” linked to the leftist mayor candidate Guilherme Boulos, the Somos Democracia network, and other Black movements decided to respect the court decision that prohibited rallies at the same time and place on June 7. After that, it didn’t make sense to organize a counter-protest against fascists when it would not mean actually confronting them.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1269707749434314752\n\n\n
The backlash took other forms in other states. Soccer matches were taking place without audiences, but football clubs were permitted to decorate the stadium with their flags. In Belo Horizonte, however, the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) banned the Resistência Alvinegra members after they displayed a flag with the image of Marielle Franco and the word “Antifa,” the same flag that had been present in street protests over the previous months. The explanation of the CBF showed that, by its rules, the word “antifa” is the same as racist and xenophobic expressions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/16.jpg\")
Massive anti-fascist flags banned from Mineirão stadium.
\nThe authorities’ fear of combative expressions and movements is obvious. We have seen a wave of upheavals in Latin America, with Ecuador, Colombia, and Chile rising against police violence, the cost of living, and neoliberal austerity measures. Some of the Brazilian left and many anti-capitalists take inspiration from those struggles, wondering if uprisings could start here too. Jair Bolsonaro himself expressed in 2019 that the government is apprehensive about the wave of protests in neighboring countries; in 2020, he showed his concern about the radicalization on the streets and his fear of Brazil “turning into a Chile” in response to the effects of the social crisis created by the pandemic. However, the government’s maneuvers indicate a desire to imitate the Chilean neoliberal model, giving total freedom for capitalists to intensify the exploitation of labor and the environment while the state reduces social services for the population. Indeed, both the crisis caused by the pandemic and the killings carried out by police have generated protests and clashes, such as the one that took place on June 15 after police officers working as private security guards murdered young Guilherme Guedes.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Antimdia1/status/1273062370164834313\n\n\n
Bolsonaro and his allied lawmakers sought to imitate Donald Trump, declaring anti-fascists a “domestic terrorist threat.” They may not actually use the law to ban anti-fascism, but history shows us that Bolsonaro can accomplish his goal directly by catalyzing his base into street violence . Extreme right groups are already doing the dirty work legitimized by the president’s speech: invading hospitals to try to “prove” that, as Bolsonaro insinuated, they are not full of patients, violating coffins to check rumors that there are no dead people but just stones inside them to simulate funerals, assaulting health professionals in hospitals or organizing protests for more resources to assist patients. We saw groups like “300 Pelo Brasil” (“300 for Brazil) camping in Brasilia and marching to the Supreme Court with torches and aesthetics explicitly inspired by the fascist “Unite the Right” mobilization in the US in August 2017. Despite suffering some arrests, both the “300” (who have no more than 30 members) and other less organized groups show that the impact of the Bolsonaro government goes beyond the damage that state institutions can do—it is bringing organized fascism and racism to the streets.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/4.jpg\")
Bolsonaro fans emulating the worst of Trump fans, May 31, 2020.
\nBut everywhere in the Americas, people are sending a clear message: we will not tolerate the rise of fascism, nor the murders perpetrated by police, the most fascist institution in our society. The streets do not belong to those who “protest in favor of the government” and do the dirty work that the police are not (yet) able to do on camera. We will continue taking the streets, with the soccer fans and others, even when traditional parties and social movements lack the courage to join us.
\n\n\n\n\n“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”
\n\n-Assata Shakur
\n
During the pandemic, workers organized strikes to halt the erosion of employee rights and working conditions. Deemed essential yet overworked and without any PPE or protective supplies, workers from crucial sectors like the subway and the postal service participated in successful strikes. Tenants associations also came together to call for a rent strike and relief, drawing less response from the media but still playing a crucial role. One new group stood out for its size, strength, and organizational creativity in uniting to defy one of the most successful businesses during the pandemic: Entregadores Antifascistas, “Anti-Fascist Couriers.”
\n\nProfessionals working with their own bikes or motorbikes for food delivery apps and the like saw a significant increase in demand for their services. Their labor was declared essential so others could stay home. Meanwhile, those who weren’t able to stay home, like the nine million people who became unemployed in the first half of 2020, tried to make ends meet in the informal labor market—which already employed more than 40% of the Brazilian workforce. International companies such as Uber and Rappi and the Brazilian Ifood have grown up to 50%, absorbing services and taking in masses of laid-off workers from companies that interrupted their activities or went bankrupt due to the pandemic, which raised the country’s unemployment rate to 13.3%. Nevertheless, more orders didn’t mean more earnings for those who work. In addition to receiving less pay, app couriers were subjected to higher health risks.
\n\nThe Entregadores Antifascistas group first emerged in São Paulo to oppose the opportunistic logic of digital businesses that individualize labor relations. Galo, who was to become one of the founding members, recorded a video on his birthday in March 2020 in which he vented his frustration after getting blocked by the app for not being able to complete a delivery because of a flat tire. The video went viral and this encouraged him to make a petition demanding meals, protective equipment, and other basic rights denied by the companies who handle couriers as if they are “entrepreneurs” and “partners” rather than employees (to such an extent that companies claim that they are the actual users’ employees). It received more than 600,000 signatures. When others joined the cause nationwide, the group came together under the name Entregadores Antifascistas as an informal union and a movement aiming to become an autonomous cooperative. Dozens of them took part in the antifascist protests of June 7, when they made a video calling for other couriers to join the movement.
\n\nEntregadores Antifascistas in the anti-fascist protests of June 7, 2020.
\nAfter attending the protests of organized soccer fan clubs and anti-fascist movements, the group called for a one-day strike (the “Breque dos App”) fro using delivery apps on July 1. This national couriers strike took place in thirteen states, demanding rights including better wages and working conditions. The only way to hinder the apps’ punitive measures towards groups or individuals who participated was to expand the movement further. They blocked avenues with hundreds of motorcycles and blockaded the delivery app companies’ main offices. A second strike occurred on July 24.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/19.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/20.jpg\")
The “App Strike” in São Paulo.
\nThe example of Entregadores Antifascistas shows how the “uberization” of employment agreements intensifies employee precarity amid the already dominant informality. Those who sell their labor power are not autonomous entrepreneurs on a level playing field with the companies that employ them. In Galo’s words, “We’re not entrepreneurs, we’re workforce!” Becoming dependent upon these apps and their algorithms, workers have only lost control. The old class division remains between elite and proletariat, employers and employees. The modernization introduced by these companies and their “gig economy” is a digital feudalism that takes advantage of the lack of regulations to do away with fixed payments, labor rights, job security, and retirement, only paying drivers, couriers, and other app workers for the kilometers they ride or for the deliveries they complete, with no established rules. Only a grassroots struggle built from the ground up that allows diffuse and isolated individuals to gather to create a language of action can strike, inflict costs upon the bosses, and achieve real changes.
\n\nIn addition to the direct impact on the health and lives of millions of people, forecasts indicate that the pandemic will subject up to 66 million more people to hunger worldwide. In Brazil, in addition to the nine million jobs lost, hunger has been one of the first problems to emerge with the economy partially closed and many people staying at home. The Bolsonaro administration contributed to creating this situation: in his first act as president, Bolsonaro eliminated organizations responsible for fighting hunger, such as the National Council for Food and Nutrition Security (Consea). The following year, he told members of the international press that “There is no hunger in Brazil.”
\n\nAlong with the health and economic crisis, there was an increase of up to 40% in the price of food. In São Paulo, for example, producers saw a drop of up to 80% in the sale of vegetables to bars and restaurants in the first months of the pandemic. Up to 70% of some products were thrown in the trash while thousands of people in the cities had no way to feed their families. The logic of the market causes producers to throw away food rather than sharing it with those who are starving and hampers the rational distribution of resources in times of crisis. If there are no profit returns, it is not useful for them to bring food to those who need it most.
\n\nMany companies have tried to advertise in the guise of charity by donating processed and industrialized food products in order to get their brand mentioned in TV reports. They used Brazilian corporate journalism to occupy prime-time millionaire minutes, getting free publicity and an image of “solidarity” for their brands.
\n\nBy contrast, between March and July, the MST (Movement of Landless Rural Workers) managed to donate 2300 tons of food to communities across the country. Family farming is responsible for up to 80% of fruit production and 60% of vegetables consumed by the population. The MST used the same model to produce and sell food below the market price, donating rice, beans, pine nuts, yerba mate, cornmeal, fruits, and vegetables on a national scale during the pandemic.2
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/9.jpg\")
Three tons of food that the MST donated during the pandemic.
\nOther initiatives demonstrated the anarchist principles of mutual aid in the urban peripheries, in squats, and in the favelas, distributing food and even offering community aseptic cleaning. In the Paraisópolis, one of the largest favelas in São Paulo, residents organized their own health care network, training and equipping 240 residents in 60 bases to act as first responders in emergencies. In addition, they distributed meals to support those who were sick, those who stayed home unable to work, and those who had no option but to go out to earn a living.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/2.jpg\")
The autonomous movement MOB [Movimento Organização de Base] carrying out a solidarity action in the Macacos community.
\nSolidarity is not a service or a “job”—rather, it is a way of changing the world together. It has been an essential activity for every revolutionary movement throughout history. People educated within capitalism know only the scarcity model created by individualized property rights. In health or economic crises, they believe that the solution is an even more intense competition for resources, for money, even for health itself. Only direct, voluntary, mutually supportive, and autonomous actions can overcome this tendency towards competition and isolation.
\n\nComrades from the Federation of Revolutionary Union Organizations in Brazil (FOB) argue that the Spanish Flu, the last global pandemic, can teach us about anti-capitalist values for the current crisis. A century ago, the Spanish Flu killed more people than the four years of World War I had. It devastated Brazilian cities, killing 35,000 people, whose bodies piled up in the streets and in mass graves in cities like Rio de Janeiro. During this period, the first significant general strike exploded—the General Strike of 1917—followed by the Anarchist Insurrection of November 1918 in Rio de Janeiro, ultimately winning rights for the whole working class. Both were led by the anarchist union movements that were hegemonic at the time.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/10.jpg\")
FOB members in community hygiene action. “Only the people save the people.”
\nStaying healthy is both a defensive and an offensive task, just like the organization we saw during the protests against racism and the police in the US and in the occupation movements of squares and buildings in the preceding years. We need forms of care that nourish the oppressed classes while undermining the state and capitalism—not just a crutch to make up for the intentional precariousness of their services. Football fans have already learned this lesson, organizing the distribution of food baskets at protests.
\n\nPandemics, social conflict, and solidarity among the poor and excluded are nothing new in these lands. Acting with a revolutionary perspective, collectives and movements can do more than simply “filling” the void of state services. We intend to show that new relations and principles can solve the problems caused by capitalist tyranny and to overcome the logic that causes such problems.
\n\n\n\n\n“For us, politics is something else. These are the words of Omama and the Xapiri people that he left us. These are the words that we hear in the time of dreams and that we prefer, because they are ours. Whites don’t dream as far as we do. They sleep a lot, but only dream of themselves.”
\n\n–Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, “A queda do céu,” 2016
\n
\n\n\n“When engineers told me they were going to use technology to recover the Doce River, they asked my opinion. I replied: ‘My suggestion is very difficult to put into practice. For we would have to stop all human activities that affect the body of the river, a hundred kilometers on the right and left banks, until it came back to life.’ Then one of them said to me: ‘But that is impossible.’ The world cannot stop. And the world stopped.”
\n\n–Ailton Krenak, “O Amanhã Não Está à Venda,” 2020
\n
Despite the advice and ancestral wisdom of the Krenak people, capitalism has not stopped, though we have seen the effect of the brief slowdown on economic and industrial activity in large cities during some moments of the lockdown. Still, there is no “new normal.” The next normality will not be “new,” but rather, a reissue of the old corruption, greed, authoritarianism, and crises of a system condemned to make crisis its form of rule.
\n\nWe watched Donald Trump lose the election in the United States to another racist and sexist who chose a police officer as his vice president.;As predicted, on January 6, 2021, we saw Trump attempt to resist defeat at the ballot box, exhorting his base to invade the Capitol. Trump’s defeat directly affects the future of Bolsonaro’s foreign policy, which is always subservient to US imperialist interests in Latin America. The Brazilian president is the last remaining declared supporter of Trump’s delusions, reproducing his narrative of electoral fraud and being practically the only head of state to justify the fascists’ invasion of US Congress on January 6. Bolsonaro is insinuating that there will be electoral fraud in 2022, emulating Trump’s speech to prepare to contest his defeat at the polls.
\n\nIn one of the many scandals involving Bolsonaro and his government, 7.5 million reais (U$1.4 million) raised to produce COVID-19 tests was given to an organization involving the president’s wife and the deputy government leader in the senate. The new normal, whether with regards to the pandemic or Bolsonaro populism, is similar to normality under other governments and crises. The same goes for business: 33 Brazilians became billionaires and the super rich expanded their fortunes during the pandemic, while fully half of the working population is unemployed for the first time in the country’s history. People die without care or tests while corrupt managers live a life of luxury financed by money intended to fight the coronavirus.
\n\nHistory does not follow a straight line of “natural progress.” The tyrannical specters that some believe had been left behind with the arrival of modernity continue to haunt us as the “plague bacillus” Albert Camus warned us of. We did not rid the world of totalitarian and obscurantist ghosts, nor of infectious pandemics—both are threatening us in the same way that they were centuries ago. Like the rise of fascism, the coming epidemics are already underway; according to experts, they can be triggered by viruses contained in threatened biomes, such as the Amazon. The disaster that we live in and that connects everyone in the world today is not a discontinued chapter in history. It is the product of capitalist exploitation and agribusiness, domestication, and the devastation of animal and plant life, from the cosmic to the microbiological level. The authoritarian forces that are capitalizing on this moment to refine their tactics and make their laws more brutal had already emerged over the past few decades; right-wing nationalist populism engulfs all continents, casting a shadow over all. From politicians like Trump and Bolsonaro to authoritarian groups like the Islamic State and fascist gangs, authoritarians aim to divide the world into a nationalist global civil war.
\n\nUnlike much of the left, who long for a “new normal” rather than paying attention to the disruptions that were already underway, we believe that if we don’t use our skills to strengthen our communities and our organizational capacity for social struggle, fascist governments, militias, and gangs will outpace us in developing theirs. The solidarity actions between communities and the fight against fascism on the streets foreshadow possible scenarios for any anti-authoritarian struggle, now or in the future; the means by which we search for a new world already show what this new world should be like. Those who organize in their neighborhoods and in the countryside to produce food will not go hungry when the centers of capitalism face global collapse. Whoever promotes solidarity will not need to compete for resources that rendered scarce only by a system that individualizes and concentrates property. Whoever organizes self-defense will not be at the mercy of police, armies, and other mercenaries, begging for defense against fascist aggressors.
\n\nThe European invasion of this land in the year 1500 generated several deadly pandemics in the Americas—which the Europeans often intentionally used as biological weapons. Probably the Incas, Guaranis, Krenaks, and Mapuches who inhabited this land also asked themselves: “When will everything return to normal?” Five centuries later, we have seen no return to what capitalism destroyed. These landscapes will always bear the marks left by all the worlds that have been destroyed here. If there is one thing we can learn from the past, it is not to hope for the “return” of what existed, but to face and overcome what is threatening us today.
\n\nHere, we remember the film Serras da Desordem (2016) directed by Andrea Tonacci, which mixes fiction and documentary to accompany Carapirú, a survivor of the massacre that gunmen inflicted upon the Awá-Guaja people in 1978. Carapirú wandered alone for 10 years, traveling 2000 kilometers. The catastrophe evoked in the film is the loss of a world without another being able to replace it. At one point in the film, we read the headline of a newspaper from the time of a meeting with Carapirú: “He dances, paints, and laughs. But it is sad.”
\n\nThe pandemic was something that many expected as a catastrophe—but when the plague finally arrived, it was like nothing anyone had imagined. The world does not behave according to our expectations, as those who seek revolution should know by now. We still do not and cannot know how to confront this epoch, because our previous way of life has been lost forever. We try daily to confront the unthinkable—to mourn the deaths of relatives, friends, strangers—to continue in our jobs—to survive—to embrace someone—to deal with destruction and anguish. We still try to be together, however separated, absorbing the experiences of individuals and collectives in this process, fighting and learning to fight until we can finally breathe again.
\n\n\n\n\n“The plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightenment of men, it will rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”
\n\n–Albert Camus, The Plague
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/26.jpg\")
“Peace for Black people. Fire for the racists.”
\n“I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.” –Mikhail Bakunin ↩
\nThe MST remains one of the main targets of the federal government and the states. In Minas Gerais, the eviction of the Quilombo Campo Grande settlement on August 13 displaced 450 families that had lived and farmed that land for more than 20 years after it was abandoned by its owner, who owed a fortune in taxes. Military police wrecked the community school and set the fields on fire, similar to the tactics the Islamic State used to expel farmers from their lands in Syria. ↩
\nEtymologically speaking, the word “inaugurate” means “to consecrate by augury”—to look for signs indicating what is to come at the opening of a new era. Since 1937, the presidential inauguration has taken place on January 20—and for the past half century, this has also become a day of resistance, as ordinary people refuse to trust the future to the rituals of politicians. Today, as we enter the Biden era, we look back on the road that took us through the Trump years to get our bearings for the way ahead.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/20/1.jpg\")
People marching in Portland immediately after the 2020 election: “The vote is over—the fight goes on.”
\nOn the morning of January 20, 2017, I stood at intersection of 12th Street and L Street in downtown Washington, DC. Before me, a double line of riot police separated me from the people surrounded in the kettle targeting participants in the massive black bloc march that had just torn through the city opposing the inauguration of Donald Trump.
\n\nThe narrow strip of no man’s land that separated us from the front line of armored mercenaries was strewn with abandoned black apparel—sweatshirts, windbreakers, masks, gloves, scarves, bags. Not knowing what was in store for the arrestees—as it turned out, practically all of them were charged with eight or more felonies apiece, though none of those charges ultimately stuck—I figured it might be better if the street were not littered with things that might be misconstrued as evidence. I began to gather up the debris.
\n\nPlucking these items from right in front of the line of officers was a risky proposition. What if the police grabbed me and pulled me into the kettle, too? Trying to look nonchalant, I managed to snatch up a scarf, then a pair of sunglasses. One of the bigger items appeared to be a full backpack. It was lying right at the foot of a glowering cop. Someone braver than me darted forward and seized it, swinging it up and withdrawing swiftly into the crowd on our side of the police line. I could see by the way the pack swung that it was heavy.
\n\nI ended up with that backpack along with an armload of black clothing. There was something in the pack, that was for sure. Something heavy and solid.
\n\nThe crowd along the police line was outnumbered; the best I could do for my comrades was to get that stuff out of there. I stepped back from the standoff and made my way south along 12th street. I passed the mouth of an alley, also strewn with clothing.
\n\nThe straps of the backpack were cutting into my shoulders. I needed to go somewhere private so I could open it up and take a look. It wouldn’t do to open it in the middle of a crowded street in full view of police officers and National Guardsmen without any idea what might be inside. I walked down to Franklin Square and found a coffee shop that was open. A dozen fresh-faced college protesters were waiting in line for the bathroom. I waited for fifteen minutes, but the line hardly moved.
\n\nEventually, I gave up and started looking for another establishment. Most of the other places were closed; some of them had lost their windows to the hammers of the black bloc. The streets in this part of DC had been desolate earlier in the day, but now they were filling up with protesters, journalists, curious locals, the occasional Trump supporter.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/01/30/16.jpg\")
Downtown Washington, DC on the afternoon of January 20, 2017.
\nI walked a block west to McPherson Square. There was some protest infrastructure there, including a tent and Food Not Bombs preparing to serve a meal, but no privacy I could take advantage of to inspect my cargo.
\n\nThe longer I carried the backpack, the heavier it got, and the more ominous its weight became. What was inside it? What if I was walking around Washington, DC with a bomb on my back? I was starting to fear that I was a character in a story by William S. Burroughs.
\n\nLooking back on that scene from the vantage point of 2021, four years later, it seems like a heavy-handed allegory. The backpack was Pandora’s box, containing all the trials and tribulations of the dawning Trump era. Its weight signified all the unthinkable things that would soon become normalized—travel bans on entire countries, fascists shooting people at demonstrations. It held the grief of all the children lost inside the detention system, separated from their parents by Border Patrol. It held the corpses of the 400,000 people who died of COVID-19 during Trump’s administration.
\n\nAnd it held the weight of our responsibility—of our capacity to respond to these tragedies. It wasn’t until I got home that night after a full day of further adventures and narrow escapes that I was finally able to set the backpack down and look inside it. I pulled the zipper open, revealing a red metal canister—a fire extinguisher. The serial numbers had been scraped off the labels so that it, too, might participate in the anonymous collective force of the black bloc. At the bottom of Pandora’s box, hope—in the form of the actions that we can take and the courage necessary to rise to the occasion.
\n\nTo whoever chose to arrive thus equipped at the departure point for the J20 black bloc—thank you. Your secret is safe with me.
\n\nAt the time, the events of January 20, 2017 were dramatic. They helped set the stage for the next four years, demonstrating that we would not let Trump implement his agenda without resistance, legitimizing the kind of confrontational tactics we needed to face his supporters and the institutions of state violence, and galvanizing people into action around the country. But by the standards of 2021, what happened in Washington, DC that day was small potatoes. This past year, people have confronted police, National Guardsmen, and fascists on a similar scale repeatedly, sometimes nightly, in cities across the country. If they had not, Trump might still hold power, election or no.
\n\nThis is why we believe it is important to remember the flashpoints of Trump era. The following is only an incomplete step towards a full accounting of the struggles and achievements of the past four years.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/20/4.jpg\")
How it started: the umbrella charge in which dozens of anarchists escaped from the kettle in Washington, DC on J20…
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/20/5.jpg\")
…and how it’s going: massive crowds face off with the police in Seattle during the high point of the struggles of 2020.
\n\n\n\n“Trump has made it very clear that if he could have seized power by brute force, he would have done so—and the rebels who made parts of many cities around the country ungovernable in May and June were among the chief factors discouraging a massive part of the capitalist class from supporting him in this endeavor. Without our grassroots resistance, his scheme could have succeeded.”
\n\n \n
Joe Biden didn’t beat Trump. It was grassroots resistance from anti-fascists, anarchists, abolitionists, and—above all—courageous members of targeted communities that limited what Trump and his supporters were able to do during his presidency.
\n\nStarting from the first day Trump came to power, a relatively small number of anarchists immediately set out to demonstrate the sort of tactics via which grassroots movements could engage in decentralized resistance. This commenced on the morning of his inauguration with blockades and a fierce anti-fascist, anti-capitalist black bloc. For a full overview of the day’s events, you can read this analysis.
\n\nBesides the iconic image of the burning limousine, the most famous footage from the day was surely the punching of fascist Richard Spencer, who had come to Washington, DC to participate in the “Deploraball” gala event the preceding night.
\n\nAt the same time, on the other side of the country, during protests against an appearance of noted misogynist, Islamophobe, and racist troll Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of Washington, two Trump supporters premeditated and executed the shooting of an anarchist protester. The police did not even try to arrest the shooter. This set an ominous precedent for the Trump years.
\n\nOn January 25, the most powerful Republicans, business elites, and alt-right white supremacists gathered in the luxury tower of one of Philadelphia’s most expensive hotels for the GOP Summit. A thousand queer protesters gathered, chanting “Any time, any place, punch a Nazi in the face!” and “Black lives matter!”
\n\nAll around the United States, protesters shut down airports in protest of Trump’s ban on immigrants from several predominantly Muslim countries coming to the United States. 30,000 people marched through marched through downtown Manhattan, effectively shutting down a large section of the financial district.
\n\nThe judges’ rulings blocking Trump’s policy only came after these protests—and Trump eventually got around them because people stopped taking to the streets, counting on the courts to fix things.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/20/6.jpg\")
Demonstrators blockading an airport at the end of January 2017 to protest Trump’s Muslim Ban.
\nOn Wednesday, February 1, Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak at the University of California at Berkeley, hoping to continue his efforts to teach young reactionaries to doxx trans and undocumented students. Fierce protests forced the university to cancel the event, prompting liberal handwringing about free speech and drawing far-right attention to Berkeley.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/20/7.jpg\")
Black bloc anarchists making it impossible for University of Berkeley police to secure Milo’s efforts to recruit for fascism.
\nAfter these first two intense weeks, the pace of resistance slowed as frontline participants sought to catch their breath and liberals began to draw people out of the streets and into fruitlessly legalistic waiting games.
\n\n\n\n\n“It is essential to organize in a way that distinguishes us from all state actors and leaves no space for the state to regain legitimacy; anti-fascism must mean opposition to the state itself, lest we topple Trump only to pave the way for an equally authoritarian regime. The sooner a crisis comes, the better, before Trump, the Deep State, and the Democratic opposition have the chance to get their feet under them; at the same time, we have considerable work to do making our proposals comprehensible to the general public. Last but not least, if regime change takes place, the momentum must come from the streets, not from within the halls of power.”
\n\n“Take the Offensive: Moving from Protest to Resistance“—an analysis from mid-February 2017 that seems prescient in the wake of the events of January 6, 2021 and the shift of power into the hands of emboldened centrists.
\n
Police evicted the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock. The Obama administration had handed the Standing Rock protesters a victory against the Dakota Access pipeline that the Trump administration immediately reversed, showing the hazards of trusting concessions from the state.
\n\nTrump supporters sought to strike back against this groundswell of resistance with their own demonstrations around the country. This represented a step in the development of the ground troops that eventually stormed the Capitol on Trump’s behalf on January 6, 2021.
\n\nSupporters of Donald Trump invaded Berkeley, physically attacking people in the name of white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and nationalism while the police looked on—successfully obtaining the footage they had been seeking with which to make recruiting videos for fascism. After this day, anti-fascists in the Bay Area were compelled to re-strategize, shifting from an approach based in small circles seeking physical confrontation to an approach that involved mass outreach to form a broader alliance against the fascists.
\n\nThe prosecution in the mass arrest case from the J20 black bloc march filed a superseding indictment adding several more felony charges to each of these defendants, so that each of two hundred defendants faced eight or more felony charges. This was unprecedented; it marked a dramatic escalation in the repression of protest.
\n\nMay Day 2017 saw lively demonstrations all around the United States. In the Northwest, Seattle witnessed a successful block party at the site of a juvenile corrections center, while in Olympia anarchists barricaded train tracks to oppose fracking and clashed with police. In Portland, demonstrators defended themselves from police who declared their march a “riot” and introduced a new kind of parade floats.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/05/03/header.jpg\")
Anarchists demonstrate their creativity with massive spider floats in Portland, Oregon on May Day.
\nIn May, Jeremy Christian, who had attended fascist rallies in Portland, murdered two people on a commuter train in Portland. In response, far-right organizers doubled down, promoting a rally that took place in downtown Portland on June 4 with the protection of the police. Anti-fascists responded, taking on both fascists and police.
\n\nIn late June 2017, there were four large defendant assemblies in DC after several days during which many defendants were arraigned and had their trial dates set. This was where the legal strategy was developed that eventually resulted in virtually all of the defendants going free.
\n\nImitating the successes of his colleagues Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in consolidating power under homophobic military regimes, Trump banned trans people from the military, rolling back progress towards LBGTQ+ inclusion in society and casting the narrowing options of trans and queer people in stark relief.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/07/27/4.jpg\")
Divide, conquer, and betray.
\nWhen footage circulated of hundreds of white supremacists marching through the streets of Charlottesville circulated on the evening of August 11, many people reacted with shock and dismay. Anarchists, anti-fascists, and a few faith-based demonstrators had been among the only people to mobilize to Charlottesville; the next day, despite being outnumbered in a series of violent clashes, they forced the police to shut down the rally. Afterwards, one young fascist participant drove his car into an anti-fascist march, grievously injuring many people and killing Heather Heyer.
\n\nThis was a wakeup call for people around the United States regarding the seriousness of the problem with white nationalism that Trump was connected to; it brought Trump’s approval rating to its lowest point in the first years of his presidency, precipitating the firing of Steve Bannon, his white nationalist advisor.
\n\nIn response, people organized solidarity demonstrations all around the United States and the world. It’s important to emphasize that while Joe Biden used the footage from Charlottesville in the first announcement of his 2020 campaign, he was nowhere to be seen in Charlottesville or in the immediate response to the Unite the Right rally.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/20/8.jpg\")
The site of the car attack in which Heather Heyer was murdered in Charlottesville.
\nThe following Monday, on August 14, demonstrators in Durham, North Carolina pulled down a Confederate monument, helping to initiate the subsequent wave of statue topplings. A subsequent fascist rally in Boston was also suppressed by massive numbers of counter-demonstrators.
\n\nTwo weeks after the “Unite the Right” rally, the same fascists who had rampaged through Berkeley on April 15 attempted to hold another rally there. This time thousands of demonstrators mobilized, preventing the police from escorting them to the rally site—a major victory against the movement that had murdered Heather Heyer.
\n\nDismayed at the failure of the police to secure a space for Nazis to recruit for fascism, the ostensibly centrist mayor of Berkeley called for “antifa” to be designated as a gang. Nonetheless, this was an important step in limiting the ability of the far right to build a street movement capable of preventing people from engaging in grassroots organizing against Trump’s agenda or the ordinary violence of the police.
\n\nFascist street organizing did not really recover from these blows until summer 2020. This effectively concluded the first intense round of conflicts in the Trump era, with costly victories for anarchists and anti-fascists but a long and uncertain road yet ahead.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/20/9.jpg\")
The black bloc preventing fascists from recruiting in Berkeley on August 27, 2017, behind a banner reading “Avenge Charlottesville—Defend your community.”
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/20/10.jpg\")
2017 ended in several hard-won victories.
\nAfter nearly a year of suspense, the first six J20 defendants to go to trial were declared innocent of all charges. The following month, the prosecutors dropped the charges against 129 more defendants.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/games/j20/images/2019-01-17-15.jpg\")
Anarchists respond to the first set of J20 verdicts.
\nFollowing the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in February 2018 and ahead of the March for Our Lives in Washington, DC people all around the United States were talking about gun violence. A new mass movement emerged for gun control. Notably, this was the first major protest movement of the Trump era demanding more government control rather than less. As such, it was a step towards the pacification of movements and the suppression of the social ferment that had achieved such important victories in 2017.
\n\nAnti-fascists mobilized against a Nazi rally in a small Southern town, only to meet a massive police response involving seven hundred officers from fully 42 city, state, and federal jurisdictions employing checkpoints, helicopters, tanks, and guns to control protesters. The first wave of fascist organizing had failed, but the armed forces of the state were stepping up to try to do what the fascists had not been able to.
\n\nThe Trump administration had once again called on US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to ramp up deportations around the country. In response to this and the news that federal officials were separating children from their parents, anarchists and other protesters occupied ICE facilities around the country, acting immediately rather than waiting for the courts or legislation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/20/11.jpg\")
\nOn June 30, on a day of nationwide demonstrations against the brutality of ICE and borders in general, fascists mobilized to march through downtown Portland protected by a massive phalanx of riot police. The ensuing clashes were reminiscent of the fascist mobilizations of 2017. Portland police opened their lines to let the fascists charge demonstrators, then attacked those the fascists had just attacked. Afterwards, we commented,
\n\n\n\n\n“From now on, every movement that attempts to come to grips with the violence of the state—such as the recent wave of protests against ICE—will likely have to deal with the violence of grassroots fascists protected by police as well.”
\n
In the beginning of July, the US Attorney’s office conceded total defeat after a year and half of persecuting the J20 defendants, dropping the remaining charges against the last 39 of them. All the others had been declared innocent or seen their charges dropped already. Against all odds, the defendants had won, blocking a legal precedent that could have made the mass movements of 2020 impossible.
\n\nIn anticipation of the one-year anniversary of the Unite the Right rally and in response to fascists attacking the Occupy ICE Encampment in San Antonio on July 28, anarchists made a call for a convergence of struggles against fascist organizing, the prison-industrial complex, and the violence of the border for the month of August. This month of action included anti-fascist mobilizations in Portland, Charlottesville, and Washington, DC and concluded with the toppling of another Confederate statue in North Carolina.
\n\nAll out for August!
\nThe toppling of a Confederate statue in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in August 2018 set the stage for a spate of statue topplings countrywide in 2020.
\nAnarchists spent the fall occupied with disaster relief and struggling to support migrants in the face of Trump’s efforts to militarize the border, while Democrats focused on the elections and toothless fetishization of “the rule of law.” The October 27, 2018 shooting that a Trump supporter carried out at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania underscored that the threat from violent fascists had not diminished at all.
\n\nThe opening of 2019 found all the contenders stymied. Trump was threatening to declare a state of emergency to fund his call for a border wall in the face of another potential government shutdown. Anarchists tried to mobilize around this, but in the end, Trump’s threats came to nothing, and along with them whatever momentum anarchists might have created. Democrats had invested themselves deeply in a cult around special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. This gave them an alibi not to join efforts to block the Trump agenda through direct action, instead seeking to present themselves as the legitimate, legalistic faction of the state—a tremendous risk, considering that Trump was slowly, steadily replacing the judiciary with judges loyal to the Republican Party.
\n\nIn response to a viral video prisoners released detailing moldy conditions inside of the Dekalb County Jail, fifty people flooded the jail, clashing with correctional officers and setting off smoke bombs inside the jail and fireworks outside it. This was part of a series of struggles against jails, prisons, and detention centers that had intensified in the movement against ICE.
\n\nOn July 13, Willem Van Spronsen was killed by police while attempting to disable the fleet of buses that serve the Northwest Detention Center, a private immigration detainment facility in Tacoma. His final statement conveyed that he was responding to the continuous raids and deportations carried out by ICE. Donald Trump had just announced that ICE was about to carry out a new round of massive raids; afterwards, asked why the raids were not happening, an ICE official expressed that they were concerned for the safety of their officers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/20/12.jpg\")
Remembering Willem van Spronsen
\nWhile things in the United States were comparatively quiet, a revolt in Puerto Rico put the governor to flight, creating a nearby reference point for the kind of movements that were already making waves in Honduras, Haiti, Sudan, and Hong Kong.
\n\nThe fact that the environmental movement of September 2019 was largely aimed at persuading a disinterested government to enact reforms indicates the ground that militant and autonomous movements had lost since 2017, or at least had failed to gain in ecological movements. Like the “March for Our Lives,” the climate strike posed the question of what to do about climate change in such a way that only a different government policy could provide a solution. This provided a basis for Democratic Party campaigning, but not for the kind of direct action that would be necessary to pressure state and corporate interests to cease to engage in the kinds of activity that are rapidly worsening the climate crisis.
\n\nOn October 6, the Trump administration announced it was pulling US troops out of northern Syria, essentially giving Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan a green light to invade Rojava, carry out ethnic cleansing, and forcibly resettle the area. Anarchists called for solidarity actions, racking up a long list of endorsements but achieving little effective mobilization outside the Bay Area and a couple other hotspots.
\n\nMeanwhile, elsewhere around the world, uprisings in Ecuador, Chile, Catalunya, Iraq, and Lebanon offered models for ungovernable social movements. These stood in stark contrast to the malaise of much left and liberal organizing in the US at the end of 2019. As we wrote in our year in review,
\n\n\n\n\n“The Democratic Party has intentionally introduced a series of spectacles aimed at centralizing itself in the popular imagination as the chief representative of anti-Trump sentiment and the only hope for social change. Foremost of these spectacles are the Mueller investigation, the recent impeachment proceedings, and the ongoing Democratic primaries. Neither the Mueller investigation nor the impeachment have threatened Trump’s power—and the 2020 election may not, either. But all three of them serve to focus attention on institutional processes and invest legitimacy in existing authority figures—including career politicians, judges, and the FBI.”
\n
Looking back on that period from today’s vantage point, especially in view of the Democratic establishment’s determination not to permit Bernie Sanders to obtain the nomination, it is by no means certain that the Democrats would have been able to galvanize enough turnout to unseat Trump had it not been for the COVID-19 pandemic and, above all, the George Floyd uprising. Centrist pundits charged—without evidence—that the uprising in the US was scaring the electorate into supporting Trump, but it is just as possible that the pandemic and the uprising drove people to the polls who might otherwise not have bothered. All summer, Biden supporters alleged that confrontational protests would bring Trump back into power, but the fact is that Trump’s popularity plunged after the George Floyd rebellion began and only began to recover when it died down.
\n\nIt would require a chronology several times the length of this one to capture all the ways that people organized through direct action to survive and respond to the catastrophes of 2020. The year saw more action than the preceding three years combined. While the struggles of 2017-2019 seem a lifetime ago, the events of 2020 should still be fresh in our memories. We should take care to fix them there, lest Democrats’ efforts to change the subject to electoral politics cause us to forget the most consequential aspects of the times we have just lived through.
\n\nTo be succinct, we can begin by emphasizing the importance of the mutual aid networks that sprang up all around the country in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/20/13.jpg\")
The mutual aid projects of 2020 have been crucial to the survival of countless people essentially abandoned by the government and betrayed by the economy.
\nWe can also note grassroots efforts to fight evictions and establish housing security in the midst of the crisis. In just one of countless examples, over the summer, unruly demonstrators smashed the windows of the courthouse in Richmond, Virginia, delaying eviction proceedings.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/20/14.jpg\")
\nWhen police murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis, bold young people regularly targeted by the same state violence brought this tragedy to everyone’s attention by chasing away the police and burning down the police precinct. If not for the courage of those who accomplished these things, we might never have learned George Floyd’s name.
\n\nThis uprising spread around the United States, becoming the fiercest revolt in contemporary US history and forcing a reckoning with racism and police violence. Liberals who attempted to portray confrontational participants as “outside agitators” were trying to co-opt a movement that had been necessarily confrontational from the very beginning. Subsequent efforts to establish autonomous zones and tear down statues representing the legacy of white supremacy underscored the extent to which this movement was based in direct action from the beginning to the end.
\n\nWhen Trump sent federal forces to Portland in a test run to see if the Department of Homeland Security officers who were loyal to him could provide sufficient force to back him in seizing power, the ones who initially mobilized to defend Portland knew the value of direct action from years of struggle, and the people who joined them swiftly learned from and expanded on those experiences.
\n\nThe showdown in Portland in July 2020 was likely an experiment to see if federal forces loyal to Trump could succeed in imposing control of the United States if he attempted to suspend or disregard the results of the election.
\nThroughout all this, liberal centrists tried to discredit direct action, as they always do, employing a range of different narratives to discourage people from acting for themselves. But passivity will not keep us safe. Liberals urged people to stay home on January 6, 2021, as well—but if Trump had succeeded in getting more elements of the government on board with his plan to seize power, staying home would have been even more dangerous than attempting to confront his supporters the way anti-fascists did in Charlottesville and Berkeley. If grassroots fascists with guns are dangerous, state violence is ten thousand times more dangerous, the more so as it becomes more and more authoritarian. In the long term, nothing is more dangerous than relying on the security apparatus of the state to protect us from the authoritarian elements within it, since the two are almost identical.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/HKrassenstein/status/1300082366581559301\n\n\n
Many understood the election as a referendum on what kind of government we want—fascist or democratic—but it also functioned to divert people from the question that the uprising had originally posed: whether we want to have any kind of government at all. Remember, according to a Newsweek poll published over the summer, 54% believed that the burning of the Minneapolis Police Precinct was justified after George Floyd’s killing. At the time, Biden was polling around 46% and Trump at 38%. It took the threat of a continued Trump government to cow people into focusing on the election rather than on extending and deepening the revolt.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/20/15.jpg\")
“Law and order”—the rallying cry of both Trump and his Democratic opposition—versus anarchy: the fight of the century.
\nIn the end, the election removed Trump from power, but it preserved all the institutions through which he and his cronies inflicted violence against people. We will have to start all over again to explain to the more comfortable elements of the population why we still oppose family separations, deportations, jails, prisons, evictions, and police now that their preferred representatives hold the reins.
\n\nA demonstration in Portland immediately after the 2020 election, asserting continued determination to resist those in power regardless of the outcome.
\nIn the final, dramatic scene of an election that stretched out over more than two agonizing months, Trump’s supporters attempted to defy the same state security apparatus that they ordinarily champion to keep their preferred ruler in power. It is one of the ironies of our age that historians may remember them as the insurrectionists, rather than the millions who repeatedly made parts of the United States ungovernable in 2020, and that this may make revolt seem foreign to those who stand to gain the most from it. When you look into the abyss, cautions Nietzsche, the abyss looks back into you—years of obsessing about a cartoon caricature of “antifa” led Trump’s most hardcore supporters to act out precisely the fantasy they were most afraid of others enacting. We should take care not to trade places with them, becoming, in turn, the duped defenders of the status quo under Biden.
\n\nOn the eve of January 20, 2021—this day of apparent transition and real continuity—rebels asserted the continuity of their own struggles by attacking a police station in Vacaville, an ICE office in San Francisco, and a courthouse in South San Francisco.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1351716185516122122\n\n\n
Not everyone is ready to go back to business as usual.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/01/20/2.jpg\")
Protesters shutting down SFO airport in January 2017 in defiance of Trump’s Muslim Ban.
\nOn the occasion of the birthday of Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev, who passed away last year, we explore what his classic 1971 film WR: Mysteries of the Organism has to offer today’s struggles against nationalism, fascism, and dogmatism.
\n\nNowadays, when we think of resisting fascism, we think of collecting intelligence on avowed fascists, doxxing them, deplatforming them, physically confronting them and the police who defend them—in short, we think of a very narrow range of activities, strategies, and desires. Yet in the mid-20th century, anti-fascism was a much broader philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic current extending from the Surrealists to the Existentialists, from Wilhelm Reich and Theodore Adorno to Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri, and Dušan Makavejev.
\n\nToday, in the Trump era, as in the mid-20th century, authoritarianism is not an aberration, but a norm grounded in a deeply repressive and hierarchical society. Like our predecessors, we have to combat it on every level, using a wide range of strategies and tools—from street tactics to pedagogy, philosophy, and cinema. This is the spirit in which we turn our thoughts to Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism.
\n\nThe following essay was solicited for and published in the second issue of Antipolitika, the premier Balkan anarchist journal, in a theme issue engaging with the legacy of Yugoslavia. All texts from both issues of Antipolitika—issue 1 on militarism and issue 2 on Yugoslavia—are available in English here. Antipolitika is also printed in Serbo-Croatian and Greek. A third issue on the topic of nationalism is currently in preparation.
\n\nYou can order print copies of Antipolitika here. You can also download this text as a zine to print and distribute.
\n\nAnarchism, crushed throughout most of the world by the middle of the 20th century, sprang back to life in a variety of different settings. In the US, it reappeared among activists like the Yippies; in Britain, it reemerged in the punk counterculture; in Yugoslavia, where an ersatz form of “self-management” in the workplace was the official program of the communist party, it appeared in a rebel filmmaking movement, the Black Wave. As historians of anarchism, we concern ourselves not only with conferences and riots but also with cinema.
\n\nOf all the works of the Black Wave, Dušan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism stands out as an exemplary anarchist film. Rather than advertising anarchism as one more product in the supermarket of ideology, it demonstrates a method that undermines all ideologies, all received wisdom. It still challenges us today.
\n\nThe struggle of communist partisans against the Nazi occupation provided the foundational mythos for 20th-century Yugoslavian national identity. After the Second World War, the Yugoslavian state poured millions into partisan blockbusters like Battle of Neretva and other sexless paeans to patriotic self-sacrifice. These films depicted a world of moral binaries: heroism versus cowardice, austerity versus indulgence, communism versus fascism.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/13/10.jpg\")
A poster for Battle of Neretva, a classic of overt militarism and repressed sexuality. Compare this with the closing scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest.
\nAt the same time, Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948 set the stage for the Yugoslavian experiment with socialism to take its own road. Geopolitically, Yugoslavia represented a third power alongside the Eastern and Western Blocs; economically, “self-management” was official government policy; socially, Yugoslavia supposedly offered a more tolerant and egalitarian alternative to US capitalism and Soviet totalitarianism.
\n\nMakavejev set out to test the limits of Yugoslavian permissiveness. Exploring the variants of Marxism, he found a road not taken in the works of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. A protégé of Sigmund Freud, Reich had founded the German Association for Proletarian Sexual Politics (Sex-Pol) to promote sexual liberation; in books like The Mass Psychology of Fascism, he sought to identify the role of psychological factors in the rise of authoritarianism. Hounded out of the Communist Party by pro-Soviet puritans and driven from Europe by the Nazi seizure of power, Reich fled to the United States. He died in prison, having spent the final years of his life as a crank promoting orgone accumulators, cloudbusters, and other pseudoscientific inventions, convinced he was still the target of “red fascist” persecution as the Food and Drug Administration burned his books.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/13/7.jpg\")
Wilhelm Reich in 1927.
\nTraveling to the United States in Reich’s footsteps, Makavejev interviewed Reich’s remaining disciples and recorded footage of therapists, artists, and entrepreneurs associated with what Reich had dubbed the sexual revolution. Returning home, he filled out the material with clips from Soviet propaganda films like The Vow and shot a fictional sequence of his own.
\n\nThe fictional sequence forms the backbone of WR’s unconventional plot, dividing the film into two “Sex-Pol” shorts. The first 25 minutes is ostensibly a documentary about Wilhelm Reich and his legacy in the US, captioned “May 1, 1931, Berlin”—when Reich’s original Sex-Pol might have made this film, in the alternate universe Makavejev concocts. The remainder of the film, captioned “May 1, 1971 Belgrade,” is set in an imagined Yugoslavia, in which the protagonist, Milena,1 attempts to implement Reich’s philosophy as a form of orthodox party communism.
\n\nWR: Mysteries of the Organism earned cult status when it was first screened in 1971, but the socialist authorities set out to suppress it almost immediately. The film was banned in Yugoslavia for a decade and a half.2 Makavejev himself was driven into exile in the West following a complaint brought against him by veteran partisans.
\n\nSpeaking to an interviewer in 1995, Makavejev attributed the banning of WR to the continuing influence of the Soviet Union in Yugoslavia. Yet the capitalist West was ultimately no more supportive of his iconoclastic filmmaking. In view of his tribulations on both sides of the divide, we can see that the repression Makavejev exposed and experienced was not confined to a single national context, but characterizes every nation under capitalism and communism alike.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/13/6.jpg\")
Wilhelm Reich and his family in exile in Maine.
\n\n\n\n“There is nothing in this human world of ours that is not in some way right, however distorted it may be.”
\n
This quotation, which Makavejev attributes to Wilhelm Reich, is the key to understanding the whole film. Setting out to expose the distortions that repression has inflicted on humanity, Makavejev presents one of the 20th century’s fiercest denunciations of authoritarianism. Yet his ultimate motives are compassionate and affirmative. He is like a physician trying to diagnose the ailments afflicting the patient and the medical profession at once; this is why the film can appear so self-contradictory.
\n\nGiven two ostensibly opposing positions, Makavejev always refuses to take sides, instead revealing the common threads that connect them. Then he introduces a third possibility as a counterpoint to the first two, and this serves as a point of departure for a new opposition to be transcended via the same method. In this way, he undermines and transforms the binaries that were essential to both Yugoslavian cinema and Cold War politics.
\n\nBeginning with Marxism and the (puritanical, repressive) Soviet Union on one side and capitalism and Western (commodified, exploitative) sexual liberation on the other, Makavejev takes the teachings of Wilhelm Reich as the basis for an imagined Yugoslavia representing a communist model for sexual liberation.3 Then he mounts a critique of sexual liberation as ideology, portraying an alternative communism in which sexual liberation could be as repressively realized as workers’ liberation was under Tito.
\n\nLike the Dadaists before him, Makavejev presents his critique via collage: montage is his answer to dialectics. He juxtaposes his documentary footage from the US with propaganda films from the Soviet Union, communist China, and Nazi Germany, along with his own fanciful Yugoslavian propaganda film. It is as if the viewer is switching between several different channels with both the soundtracks and the themes bleeding over from one to the next; each transition complicates and intensifies the web of associations.
\n\nFor example, following a portrait of the conservative townspeople in the part of Maine where Reich settled, Makavejev cuts back to the streets of New York City, presenting Andy Warhol starlet Jackie Curtis promenading through the bright lights of the business district with her boyfriend. Over this scene, Makavejev dubs a radio commercial: “You own the sun with Coppertone.” The US is at once a bastion of small-town conservatism and a land of freedom in which sexual difference manifests as the commodification of the self on the market of identity. Provincial intolerance alongside the repressive tolerance of the metropolis—what Herbert Marcuse called “repressive desublimation.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/13/5.jpg\")
In the opening scene of WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Makavejev decodes the undertones of the famous Mao Tse-tung quotation, “If you want to make an omelette, you’ve got to break a few eggs,” regarding sex, reproduction, and destruction.
\nThe protagonist of the sequences set in Yugoslavia is Milena, an apostle of Wilhelm Reich’s prescriptions for sexual liberation. Milena is the ideologue incarnate: passionate and doctrinaire, she has substituted advancing the party line for the actual fulfillment of her program. We see her reading Reichian propaganda, smoking a cigar à la Sigmund Freud, and sitting in her orgone accumulator while her housemate, Jagoda, makes love.
\n\nMilena’s voice in the film is also Reich’s voice, but behind that, it is Makavejev’s voice—the voice of a Yugoslavian making a documentary about Reich. Milena is Makavejev’s double, a dogmatic sendup of his own interest in Reich’s ideas as an emancipatory program—and of Yugoslavia’s dalliance with Marxism. Milena’s martyrdom is an allegory of Reich’s persecution and exile, foreshadowing Makavejev’s own misfortunes in his homeland and then in the West.
\n\nIn the most famous scene of WR, Milena steps out onto the balcony of her apartment to harangue her neighbors in a sequence that channels the greatest Soviet propaganda films. “Socialism must not exclude human pleasure from its program!” she declaims to proletarian applause, a demagogue of sexual freedom. “The October Revolution was ruined when it rejected free love!” (The camera cuts to her housemate Jagoda, who gasps “War of liberation!” as she tries—playfully?—to escape her male lover.) “Frustrate the young sexually and they’ll recklessly take to other illicit thrills… political rallies with flags flying, battling the police like pre-war Communists! What we need is a free youth in a crime-free world!”
\n\nClad in a mini-dress and an army jacket, Milena builds to her climax. “Sweet oblivion is the masses’ demand! Deprive them of free love and they’ll seize everything else! That led to revolution. It led to Fascism and Doomsday!” At first viewing, it could appear that Milena is championing sexual liberation. In fact, she is laying out a prescription for repressive desublimation as a vaccine against revolution.
\n\nThe scene ends like a classic partisan film, with everyone singing a Yugoslavian folk song together—and suddenly, the film cuts to a rally in Beijing at which tens of thousands of people are raising Mao’s little red book in the air in unison. Stalin, glamorized in a Soviet propaganda film, strides out to the tune of a zither: “We have demonstrated our ability not only to destroy the old order, but to build in its place a new socialist order.”
\n\nThis is the problem—how order succeeds order, the dictator replacing the Tsar just as Oedipus replaced his father. The film cuts to a scene in which an inmate in a mental hospital is undergoing electric shock therapy, and the zither resumes, driving home the association between patriarchal leadership, state power, and the institutional enforcement of mental health. The norms of sexual liberation are no more liberating than the norms of Marxism, which are no more liberating than the norms of capitalism.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/13/4.jpg\")
Milena smoking a cigar like Sigmund Freud or Che Guevara.
\nAs the movie shifts into high gear, Milena goes to see a Russian figure skating troupe perform. She and her housemate are in the company of two young soldiers: “Consider yourself protected by the Yugoslav People’s Army,” one says flirtatiously.
\n\n“But who will protect me from you?” Milena’s housemate responds.
\n\nMilena is not impressed by low-ranking Yugoslavian soldiers. She sets her sights on the star Russian figure skater. He is nationalistic manhood personified; the stage makeup of his profession only accentuates his icy masculinity. When she approaches him backstage for an autograph, he recites his answers directly out of a Communist Party phrasebook. His name is Vladimir Ilich—an overt reference to Lenin.
\n\nMilena’s attraction to Vladimir Ilich underscores the point that our current desires will not necessarily lead us out of the order that produces them. (“You are locked into your suffering,” sings Leonard Cohen, “and your pleasures are the seal.”) Earlier in the film, we hear Jackie Curtis describe her lover Eric as “an American hero” while Tuli Kupferberg prowls Manhattan with a toy machine gun, aping a US soldier. At the opening of the movie, Kupferberg4 intones, “He who chooses slavery—is he a slave still?”
\n\nMilena takes Vladimir Ilich back to her apartment to introduce the haughty Russian to the ideas of her mentor, Wilhelm Reich. “His name is World Revolution,” she explains, giving us another way to decode the title of the film. “He teaches that every nice person like you and me hides behind his façade a great explosive charge… A great reservoir of energy that can be released only by war or revolution.”
\n\n“In me? Me too?” interrupts Milena’s housemate, having stripped naked. “Love and crime. Give me some.“
\n\nAt this moment, to the sound of a madcap Balkan horn line, Milena’s ex-lover, the lumpen-proletarian Radmilović, comes smashing through the wall like a cartoon superhero out of Deleuze and Guattari.5 Radmilović functions as a sort of Shakespearean fool: because he is a sexist, drunken lout, he can say and do things that would otherwise be inadmissible in Yugoslavian film. When we first encounter him, he is barricading a road; he accuses a BMW driver of being a member of the red bourgeoisie. Makavejev puts his own anarchistic ideas in the mouth of a communist caricature of an anarchist in order to save the authorities the trouble of having to caricature him themselves—a comic lampoon of a timeless socialist tactic.
\n\nInterrupting the conversation about Reich, Radmilović cheerfully hustles Vladimir Ilich into a wardrobe and commences nailing it shut. Milena is mortified: “Free the People’s Artist!”
\n\nThe Id traps the Superego in the closet: turnabout is fair play!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/13/8.jpg\")
Milena attempting to explain to Vladimir Ilich how patriarchal power and personality structure figure in the emergence of fascism. “Speaking truth to power” is a time-honored liberal strategy—and if it generally fails, it is not only because power is unimpressed by truth, but also because the speaker is usually not aware of the footholds the attraction to power has already established within her.
\nThe scene returns to New York, where Nancy Godfrey is preparing to make a plaster cast of New York entrepreneur Jim Buckley’s phallus. While Godrey massages Buckley to erection, we see Milena reading aloud from Lenin’s The State and Revolution, in which Lenin quotes Engels:
\n\n\n\n\n“The proletariat needs the state, not in the interests of freedom, but in order to subdue its enemies, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist.”
\n
In other words, the state (the concentration of power and authority in the hands of a few) is to create the conditions for freedom (the distribution of power and agency to all on a horizontal basis). “Kill for Peace” by The Fugs kicks in on the soundtrack, a comparably oxymoronic program.
\n\nAs Godfrey packs plaster around Buckley’s erection, the soundtrack shifts to Czech classical composer Bedřich Smetana’s patriotic theme, “The Moldau.” Smetana’s composition connects naturalism and nationalism, evoking the reverence with which male sexual potency is venerated in patriarchal society. The camera cuts briefly to Jackie Curtis paying obeisance at a Catholic shrine; the virginal saint above her is holding a skull. Briefly, we glimpse Milena releasing Vladimir Ilich from the wardrobe.
\n\nIn the plaster casting scene, Makavejev is depicting the reduction of living sexuality to a commodity, an inert representation. What seems like a celebration of manhood and male power is actually a substitution tantamount to castration: the inorganic for the organic, the artificial for the real, the rigid for the flexible, the statue of the hero for the flesh of the human being. Those who seek patriarchal status and political power willingly make this exchange, not understanding that these supplant rather than supplement their personhood.
\n\nThe classic example of this is Lenin’s corpse, preserved in Red Square for workers to file dutifully past. Posters around the USSR blazoned Vladimir Mayakovsky’s words: “Even now, Lenin is more alive than the living.” Raised to superhuman status as an icon, Lenin not only ceased to be a living, breathing human being—he also drained others of life and freedom.6
\n\nWhen the duplication of Buckley’s organ is complete, WR jumps back to the Soviet propaganda reel, equating Stalin with the ersatz phallus. “Comrades, we have successfully completed the first stage of communism!” Stalin proclaims, joining everyone in applauding his own declaration.
\n\nThis is Makavejev at his bitterest. Stalin’s “first stage of communism” is the reduction of life to inorganic matter—the substitution of duplicate for original, of ideology for experience, of program for desire, of permanence for presence, of power for pleasure, of nation for people. The film cuts to a man in a straitjacket slamming his head against a wall over and over to the sound of another communist hymn: “We thank the Party—our glorious Party—for bringing happiness to every home.”
\n\nAt a time when the Yugoslavian government relied on filmmaking as one of the chief means of promoting patriotism and obedience, Makavejev was a mutineer turning his weapon against his superiors. Today, when access to the means of media production has become so widespread, it’s difficult to grasp how forcefully subversive this was in 1971.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/13/9.jpg\")
The balcony scene—arguably, one of the high points of world cinema.
\nThe argument thus formulated, WR speeds towards its catastrophic conclusion.\nMilena and Vladimir Ilich are walking through a snowy park together. Finally, they kiss, and, as the soundtrack swells with plaintive violins, Vladimir Ilich soliloquizes about Beethoven:
\n\n\n\n\nNothing is lovelier than the Appassionata. I could listen to it all day! Marvelous, superhuman music! With perhaps naïve pride, I think, “What wonders men can create!” But I can’t listen to music. It gets on my nerves!
\n\nIt arouses a yearning in me to babble sweet nothings, to caress people living in this hell who can still create such beauty. But nowadays, if you stroke anybody’s head, he’ll bite your hand off! Now you have to hit them on the head. Hit them on the head mercilessly, though in principle we oppose all violence!
\n
At the culmination of this speech, he strikes Milena for attempting to touch him.
\n\nThese words, of course, are straight from Lenin’s mouth, via Gorky’s memoirs of the Great Leader. As the ultimate homo politicus, Lenin feared eruptions of strong feeling. From the perspective of the tactician, all sentiment should be strategic, all raw energy should be channeled into rationalized systems. In place of spontaneous expressions of love for humanity, merciless violence.
\n\nMikhail Bakunin, the revolutionary anarchist, is also remembered for his love of Beethoven’s music. Yet he never fled from his passions. In Paris, he lived with a pianist so as to hear Beethoven every day. Shortly before the final uprising of the revolutions of 1848-49, Bakunin went to hear his favorite composition, the 9th Symphony, performed in Dresden; afterwards, he was accused of burning down the opera house in which it had been performed. In 1876, in the final weeks of his life, he set out on one last journey to visit the pianist one more time: “All this will pass away,” Bakunin confided to him, “but the Ninth Symphony will remain.”7
\n\nIn the contrast between these two Russian revolutionaries, we see two fundamentally different ways of relating to the tides of emotion that surge through us. On Lenin’s side, we see control, austerity, order, violence. On Bakunin’s side, freedom, indulgence, excess, passionate love, the river bursting its banks.
\n\nShocked at his own aggression, Vladimir Ilich entreats Milena to forgive him. Furious, she responds:
\n\n\n\n\nYou love all mankind, yet you’re incapable of loving one individual, one single living creature! What is this love that makes you nearly knock my head off? You said I was as lovely as the revolution. But you couldn’t bear the “Revolution” touching you!
\n
Milena’s indictment of Vladimir Ilich is Reich’s indictment of Lenin and Hitler and Stalin; it is Makavejev’s indictment of Tito and of all patriarchal power and personality structure. It’s also one of the fiercest expressions of disillusionment with state socialism to reach us from the 20th century.
\n\nAs Milena concludes her speech, Vladimir Ilich embraces her, remorseful and abashed. They make love.
\n\nThen, unhinged by postcoital shame, he kills her, beheading her with an ice skate, the emblem of his profession. It is not safe to sleep with patriarchy.
\n\nThe movie concludes with two powerful gestures of affirmation and forgiveness.
\n\nWe see Milena’s disembodied head on an autopsy tray. As the camera zooms in past the forensic investigators, her head comes to life and addresses us, describing the outcome of her liaison with Vladimir Ilich, “a genuine Red Fascist.”
\n\n“Comrades!” she proclaims, indomitable even in death. “Even now I am not ashamed of my communist past.”
\n\nThis is Milena speaking for Wilhelm Reich, but it is also Makavejev speaking—and through him, it is Yugoslavia speaking, and the entire 20th century. Milena’s refusal to feel shame about her fate is Makavejev blessing humanity: all our clumsy efforts to free ourselves, all the revolutions and liberation struggles that ended in dictatorship and dogma, all our human frailty. There is nothing in this human world of ours that is not in some way right, however distorted it may be.
\n\nThen the camera cuts to Vladimir Ilich, her murderer. Utterly bereft, he is staggering through the snow, his hands soaked in blood, recoiling in horror from himself. Imagine if all the dictators, mercenaries, and rapists in the history of the world suddenly came to understand all the harm they have done, experiencing in full the tragedy they have inflicted.
\n\nMakavejev has Vladimir Ilich sing “François Villon’s Prayer” by Russian singer Bulat Okudzhava, whose recordings were suppressed in Russia at the time:
\n\n\n\n\nBefore the earth stops turning
\n\n
\nBefore the lights go dim
\nTo each one, Lord, I pray thee
\nGrant what is needful to him…To the one whose hand is open
\n\n
\nGrant rest from charity
\nA gift of remorse to Caine
\nBut also, remember me…Oh Lord, thou art all-knowing
\n\n
\nI believe in Thy wisdom then
\nAs the fallen soldier believes
\nThat in heaven he’s alive again…As all men must believe
\n
\nThey know not what they do…
\nGrant to each some little thing
\nAnd remember, I’m here too.
“And remember, I’m here too,” entreats Vladimir Ilich, begging for an impossible absolution at the end of a century of holocausts. “Remember, I’m here too,” repeats Okudzhava, and we see Milena’s smile become Reich’s.
\n\nIn giving remorse to Caine, Makavejev implores us to compassion—not just for Milena, Reich, himself, and all who have suffered at the hands of authoritarians, but also for Lenin, for Stalin, for Tito and Eisenhower, for all of humanity locked in cycles in which we do harm to those we love. This is Makavejev’s answer to the moral binaries of the partisan blockbuster.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/13/3.jpg\")
Makavejev’s trialectics: Milena, protagonist of WR, both dead and alive, and director Dušan Makavejev himself.
\nSpeaking about WR years later, Makavejev reflected:
\n\n\n\n\nYou can die from freedom, like you can die from too much fresh air, if you are not used to it… I think that over-controlled people have very good reasons for saying that freedom is dangerous. When over-controlled people relieve their irrationalities, they often become chaotic, narcissistic, murderous, or suicidal because they just can’t stop.
\n
This implies that the proper road to liberation is a carefully managed process in which the free expression and satisfaction of sexual desire can be properly moderated. In other words, repressive desublimination. But can you really die of too much fresh air?
\n\nAs so often occurs, the tale is wiser than the teller. It’s not too much freedom that kills Milena and makes Vladimir Illich into a murderer. Radmilović, the representative of chaos and irrationality, does no harm to anyone, and almost succeeds in quarantining Vladimir Ilich. The problem is not too much freedom, but too much control, too much certainty, too much doctrine. The realization of any totalizing system brings all its flaws and fault lines into relief, magnifies them—like the USSR—to the size of continents.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/13/2.jpg\")
The dismembered corpse of Yugoslavia in 2018.
\nWe can read WR as a simple allegory of 20th-century international relations: smitten with the USSR, Yugoslavia throws herself at him, only to be betrayed. But if we read Vladimir Ilich more abstractly as a symbol of patriarchal nationalism, it appears that Makavejev foretold the civil war of the 1990s twenty years in advance.
\n\nLike Milena, Yugoslavia was murdered, torn apart by authoritarian currents that had never been rooted out by the sham self-management of state socialism. Just as no dictatorship can create the conditions for the liberation of humanity, in the final analysis there is no such thing as an anti-fascist state. The same seeds of fascism and civil war lurk within all nationalisms, within all valorizations of power and duty. Every nation will be a time bomb like Yugoslavia until we disassemble all of them down to their deepest foundations, which are rooted deep within ourselves.
\n\nShould we attribute Yugoslavia’s collapse to an excess of id or a surfeit of superego? Did the nationalist wars that tore up the country represent unfettered desire giving rise to violence, or were they caused by the forces that have always distorted and repressed desire? Was the problem too much freedom on the scale of the nation—or too much despotism on the molecular level, the scale of the individual?
\n\nHow we answer these questions will determine how we respond to nationalist violence in the 21st century: whether we understand it as an excess interrupting the present order or as the purest manifestation of that order. Is desire itself the problem, to be controlled with laws and interventions from transnational military bodies? Or is control the problem, which we can only undermine from the bottom up by means of autonomous subversion and transgression? Is the solution a greater nationalism—Yugoslavian rather than Serbian and Croatian, for example—or to abolish all forms of nationalism once and for all?
\n\nAnd how can we set out to do that without replacing nationalism with another dogma, another ideology? Makavejev’s methodology and compassion give us a point of departure.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/13/1.jpg\")
“Men [sic] fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.” -William Morris, A Dream of John Ball
\nCompounding the (faux) documentary aesthetic of WR, all the main characters with the exception of the Russian, Vladimir Ilich, are named for the actors who play them. “Excuse me,” Vladimir Ilich interjects at one point, “this is a photo montage, isn’t it?”
\n\n“No, it’s authentic,” answers Milena. ↩
\nIn summer 1971, political figures and “cultural workers” attended a special screening of WR in Novi Sad in order to decide whether to ban it. Some 800 people attended. The screening was interrupted by both applause and booing; the atmosphere was electric during the subsequent discussion.
\n\nMany people supported the film. The critic Petar Volk defended the freedom to criticize, insisting that Makavejev shouldn’t be seen as “a typical anarchist, nor a typical artist, anti-artist, communist, anticommunist.” He insisted that every work of art is political, but that even when art criticizes, it shouldn’t be seen as hostile.
\n\nMost political figures spoke against WR. One said, “The film placed all of the ideologies of the world in the same hole, including the ideology of self-management. Some have tried to defend it here, saying that the struggle against every dogmatism shouldn’t accept any dogma. I agree with that. But we have to say where we are, on which side, for what ideology. Fascism and anti-fascism, Stalinism and anti-Stalinism do not go together…”
\n\nAnother: “I think this is a real political diversion and an attack on things we consider holy, such as Lenin, such as a communist red flag, our movement, our efforts and the victims we sacrificed and still sacrifice for that. This is throwing mud on all of those holy things…” Still another said that if Petar Volk showed up among his workers with his long hair, they would throw him out head first.
\n\nEven after this debate, the Commission for Cinematography allowed the film, but the public prosecutor banned it the following month. The ban was lifted only in 1986. ↩
\n“I’ve been to the East, and I’ve been to the West, but it was never like this!” Vladimir Ilich says of Makavejev’s Yugoslavia. ↩
\nKupferberg was an anarchist, a pacifist, and a member of the subversive New York City rock band, the Fugs. ↩
\nFor a chilling example of how “non-statist micro-politics” of affective subversion can be reappropriated for the project of repression in the same way that revolutionary communism became the state religion of totalitarian nations, consult Eyal Weizman’s “Walking Through Walls,” in which he relates how the Israeli Defense Force employed concepts from A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari to strategize assaults on Palestinian refugee camps. ↩
\n“Every fury on earth has been absorbed in time, as art, or as religion, or as authority in one form or another. The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can strike is to do fury honor. Swift, Blake, Beethoven, Christ, Joyce, Kafka, name me a one who has not been thus castrated. Official acceptance is the one unmistakable symptom that salvation is beaten again, and is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas.”
\n\n-James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, quoted in Myron Sharaf’s biography of Wilhelm Reich, Fury on Earth. Sharaf appears in WR in the documentary material. ↩
\nBeethoven’s 9th Symphony also figures prominently in Makavejev’s films Man Is Not a Bird and Sweet Movie. ↩
\nOn September 9, the news came out that a whistleblower within the Department of Homeland Security had filed a complaint about the department’s Trump-appointed leadership instructing him to downplay the threat represented by white supremacists and play up the dangers posed by anarchists and anti-fascists. Yet it has largely escaped notice how Joe Biden and other Democrats have embraced Donald Trump’s talking points about anarchists and anti-fascists. It is convenient for centrist Democrats that they can pose as Trump’s moderate critics while appropriating his talking points about protesters, letting him do the dirty work of establishing the narratives that justify state repression.
\n\nIn remarks on July 28, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden grouped “anarchists” with “arsonists,” asserting that “arsonists and anarchists should be prosecuted,” endorsing Trump’s repeated allegation that adherence to anarchist ideas is itself some kind of crime on a par with arson. On September 7, when Barbara Barr asked Biden “Do you condemn antifa?” he answered, “Yes, I do,” associating “antifa” with “violence, no matter who it is.” This endorses a narrative Trump has been avidly promoting for years, especially since his May 31 tweet that “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.”
\n\nTrump and others on the far right have long sought to establish opposition to fascism as sufficient cause to justify state surveillance and intervention. This is one of the steps on the road to totalitarianism. The US two-party system functions like a ratchet, with the Republican Party steadily pulling public policy and permissible discourse to the right while Democrats, in seeking to acquire power by chasing the political center, serve as a mechanism that prevents policy and discourse from shifting back. As the Democrats follow the Republicans in steadily countenancing more and more authoritarianism, the work that Trump is doing to frame anarchists, anti-fascists, and other protesters as legitimate targets will also be useful to Biden’s party. We need to understand how this works now, lest the continuation of current state repression after a potential Biden victory catch us flat-footed.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/carterforva/status/1288221642968236032\n\n\n
According to a complaint filed by whistleblower Brian Murphy, acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and “Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security” Ken Cuccinelli instructed officials at the DHS to alter intelligence reports to reflect Trump’s fear-mongering talking points about anarchist and anti-fascist violence while downplaying the threat that far-right and white nationalists pose to the general population. From the text of the complaint:
\n\n\n\n\nDuring multiple meetings between the end of May 2020 and July 31, 2020, Mr. Murphy made protected disclosures to Messrs. Wolf and Cuccinelli regarding abuse of authority and\nimproper administration of an intelligence program with respect to intelligence information on ANTIFA [sic] and “anarchist” [sic] groups operating throughout the United States. On each occasion, Mr. Murphy was instructed by Mr. Wolf and/or Mr. Cuccinelli to modify intelligence assessments to ensure they matched up with the public comments by President Trump on the subject of ANTIFA and “anarchist” groups.
\n
In addition, Cuccinelli instructed Murphy to modify reports about white supremacist organizing in order to make “the threat appear less severe,” and to add “information on the prominence of violent ‘left-wing’ groups.”
\n\nOne DHS report was edited so that references to white supremacists “presenting the most lethal threat” were replaced with the words “Domestic Violent Extremists,” a catchall term used to create a false equivalence between those who promote and carry out racist attacks and those who organize to defend their communities against them.
\n\nAfter these revelations, when Democrats like Biden and corporations like Facebook continue to frame anarchists and anti-fascists as a threat to the general public, it must be clear to everyone that they are willfully advancing a false narrative Donald Trump concocted to target his enemies.
\n\nIf they continue to promote this narrative, it will be because, like Trump, they wish to preserve the tremendous disparities of capitalism and white supremacy, which anarchists and anti-fascists seek to undo. They too want tyranny—a kinder, gentler, more sustainable tyranny. They just don’t want to be the ones held responsible for escalating it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/10/1.jpg\")
Protesters outside Chad Wolf’s home in Alexandria, Virginia.
\nSince its establishment, the Department of Homeland Security has always targeted protest movements—but much more so, it has played a fundamental role in intensifying Islamophobia and other forms of systemic oppression. From the perspective of those who desire to live in a free and egalitarian society, there is no right way for DHS representatives to assess the terror threats facing the United States. The department itself exists for the sole purpose of carrying out surveillance and directing lethal force against anyone who might threaten the ruling order. The considerable attention Murphy’s complaint has received from self-professed leftists indicates the degree to which many leftists are willing to join centrists in legitimizing representatives of the institutions that the left otherwise ostensibly opposes, so long as those representatives are taking a stand against Trump specifically.
\n\nThis shows us how much ground radicals stand to lose by focusing on Trump alone—one of the insidious tendencies of the aforementioned ratchet effect. Liberal centrists already experienced the disastrous consequences of this approach in the disappointments that awaited the millenarian cult around former FBI director Robert Mueller. Biden is just the latest beneficiary of this tendency to seek a “legitimate” representative of entrenched power to counter Trump’s ascendancy in the name of the law. The problem is that the law is not something above the US government, that Mueller or Biden can use to bring Trump to order; the law only has force by virtue of the same government that Trump already dominates.
\n\nIt’s foolish to argue that in targeting protesters rather than fascists, the DHS is focusing on the wrong threat. The important thing to understand here is that there is a shakeup taking place inside the state institutions of repression—a shakeup aimed at expanding the targets of “anti-terror” operations to include an ever-increasing number of anarchists, anti-fascists, leftists, and other dissidents, especially those from demographics that are already targeted on account of ethnicity, class, and religion. At the same time, the space that is allocated for extra-legal action to defend white supremacy is continuing to expand—witness Trump’s praise of Kyle Rittenhouse. Rather than offering the DHS an opportunity to re-legitimize itself by promising to protect us from white supremacists—which would simply provide another rationale for politicians to allocate resources to the DHS that will inevitably be directed against targeted communities and protest movements—we have to point to the systemic factors that ensure that as long as it exists, DHS will always serve to oppress people and crush movements for freedom and equality.
\n\nDHS has been expanding the scope of its targets while giving white supremacists a free pass since its inception, well before Trump came to power. At the opening of the Obama years, another DHS employee, Daryle Johnson was pushed out of the department for sounding the alarm about far-right activity ahead of a wave of killings. More recently, fusion centers have served to transmit far-right conspiracy theories to local police departments, ensuring that local police prioritize targeting anti-fascists while often working hand in glove with Trump supporters, militias, and other far-right groups. The recent wave of Blue Leaks has only confirmed the degree to which federal officers are embracing far-right priorities in focusing on repressing anarchists and anti-fascists.
\n\nOnce the latest shakeup in the DHS is complete, there will be no more revelations of the sort we see in Murphy’s complaint. Both parties will accept that the department exists to attack anarchists, protesters, and others who oppose fascism and police violence. White supremacists will have acquired even more leeway to organize and carry out attacks without facing pushback from the state.
\n\nAnd this process can take place under Biden as well as under Trump.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/KELLYWEILL/status/1303793442972196868\n\n\n
Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli are both serving unlawfully as a result of Donald Trump’s machinations to avoid the mandated appointment process. Wolf especially is already infamous for drafting a policy to snatch children from their parents at the US border and for sending federal officers from a variety of DHS departments to Portland in an attempt to suppress protests. Many analysts interpret the deployment of federal officers to Portland and elsewhere as a test run to prepare to use federal forces countrywide to impose Trump’s authority should he win, suspend, or steal the 2020 election.
\n\nWolf has staked his career on supporting Trump’s efforts to consolidate power, emphasizing that the wishes of local authorities are utterly beside the point. “President Trump has made it abundantly clear that there will come a point when state and local officials fail to protect its citizens from violence, the federal government will have no choice but to protect our American citizens,” Wolf wrote in a letter to Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler on August 31. Wolf emphasized this point again on September 9, asserting that DHS has a “moral and legal duty” to “protect” cities from “rioters.”
\n\nDemocrats and leftists have responded to this escalating situation the same way they have responded to four years of the Trump program: by spreading information, “speaking truth to power,” and the like. None of this has done anything to compel Wolf or Cuccinelli to step down from their posts or to change the trajectory of the DHS or the white supremacists who support Trump. Chiefly, it just gives Democrats an alibi to tell voters that they are not to blame for the authoritarian turn of the state. If Democrats really believed in the rules that forbid Wolf and Cuccinelli to govern DHS, they would do something about it, not register complaints.
\n\nArguably, the only reason left-leaning Democrats have any leverage on the ruling class whatsoever is that the poor, desperate, and politicized are prepared to go to great lengths to interrupt business as usual and make great swaths of the United States ungovernable. Like all reformists, the Democrats derive their leverage on other elements of the ruling class from the unrest that they promise to quell—but in order to maintain that leverage, they have to show that they can quell the unrest without making too many concessions. The ratchet, once again.
\n\nSo perhaps it is naïve to attribute the weakness of the Democrats to naïveté. While Trump encourages his supporters to prepare to help him secure power in a contested election, while the police who support him go on carrying out extrajudicial murders of people of color and the occasional white anti-fascist as well, Democrats are intentionally not seeking to mobilize the kind of force that could prevent Trump from seizing and maintaining power.
\n\nIf Trump does try to hold on to power in defiance of electoral protocol, Democrats are counting on protesters to risk their lives to make this untenable. Anarchists, anti-fascists, and participants in the fiercest aspects of the anti-police uprisings and the Black Lives Matter movement are the only social force that could accomplish this. But the Democrats offer no allegiance to the people they expect to risk death on their behalf. Indeed, they are already selling them out ahead of the election.
\n\nIn the long term, centrists like Biden likely aim to establish a new social peace by rallying a critical mass of voters—and capitalists—behind them, then sacrificing Black demonstrators, anarchists, and anti-fascists on the altar of “homeland security” as a concession to placate the far right. Trump’s laughable talking point that Biden represents the “rioters” who compelled our society to grapple with the senseless murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and so many more Black people barely conceals the fact that the opposite is true: Biden represents another strategy for maintaining the same state of affairs that Trump intends to, the same status quo that resulted in all those murders. This explains Biden’s embrace of Trump’s talking points about anarchists and anti-fascists and “violence” itself, which is a code word for anything that interrupts the unceasing violence that is necessary to maintain the grievous disparities in privilege, property, and power that characterize our current social order.
\n\nShould Biden win the election, we will have to be prepared to fight just as hard against repression from the Department of Homeland Security and other state agencies as we will have to fight if Trump wins. The only distinction is that under Trump, the repression will be brutal but widely unpopular, whereas under Biden, it will be more discreet but broadly accepted as legitimate.
\n\nThis is why we must not grant a millimeter to Biden’s rhetoric about “violent” anarchists, nor trust that Biden will do anything to rein in DHS. Don’t grease the ratchet. Break it.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/elivalley/status/1311095095215689728\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/08/26/doxcare-prevention-and-aftercare-for-those-targeted-by-doxxing-and-political-harassment", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/08/26/doxcare-prevention-and-aftercare-for-those-targeted-by-doxxing-and-political-harassment", "title": "Doxcare : Prevention and Aftercare for Those Targeted by Doxxing and Political Harassment ", "summary": "A step-by-step guide explaining how to protect yourself from online stalkers, why it's important, and what to do if you are targeted for doxxing.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/26/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/26/header.jpg", "date_published": "2020-08-26T18:02:08Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:46Z", "tags": [ "anti-fascism", "fascism", "doxxing", "security culture" ], "content_html": "
This step-by-step guide explains how to protect yourself from online stalkers, why it is important, and what to do if you are targeted for “doxxing”—the publishing of your private information. In a era of universal surveillance, when livestreamers broadcast every major demonstration while fascists, FBI agents, and police officers comb through social media posts to gather intelligence with which to harass activists, there has never been a better time to take steps to secure your privacy. Here’s how.
\n\nI have been active in my community for years. Not long ago, far-right trolls found social media accounts of my friends, family, and workplace. They stalked me and used the photos they found of me and my family members to assemble timelines of my life and to map my social networks. Because of my anti-racist beliefs, they used the information they gathered to threaten me, my family, and my friends. In every harassing email and social media comment, they characterize the projects I participate in as “terrorist groups,” describing me as a “leader” and member of an imaginary “shadowy mob of violent leftists” that they want to “do something serious about.” Whether these conclusions are just shoddy investigative work or intentionally dishonest misrepresentations, their behavior should be concerning to anyone who believes in standing up against oppression.
\n\nI deactivated my social media when I learned that this was underway—not because I am ashamed of being associated with the struggle for a freer world, but because I want to protect my friends and social networks. Anyone who knows me knows it is no secret that I oppose all forms of bigotry and oppression. They did not target me specifically for anything in particular I have done, but because they are opposed to all anti-racist, feminist, and queer activism and they think that they can isolate and intimidate us one by one. This is why we need to stand by each other.
\n\nI want you to know about this in case you ever find yourself in the same situation. You are not alone. I hope this encourages you to think seriously about your personal online security and the security of your family members and friends.
\n\nRobert Bowers, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, publicly chatted with alt-right trolls who doxxed anti-racists. The stalking campaign against me shows that they are willing to manufacture falsehoods to put people in those crosshairs. The only way to protect ourselves is to keep showing up for each other. We must not let them intimidate us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/26/2.jpg\")
Stay safe.
\nDoxxing means publishing a person’s private information with the intention of exposing and intimidating them. This can result in physical, emotional, and economic harm to the target. It is intended to dissuade the target from action and to shame them for their ideas and values. It is important to take security seriously before you are doxxed—before you even have reason to fear that you could be doxxed. Often a doxxer will wait until they have gathered a lot of information before releasing it. It is possible that you are already being stalked and will not find out until it is too late.
\n\nWhether you are a well-known public activist or hardly involved at all, you should protect your social networks and other spheres of your life—even if you don’t think you are doing anything that would warrant attention. Maintaining good practices protects your friends, family, and community. It is common for people to be included in right-wing conspiracy theories about “Antifa members” solely because they are queer or trans, “look like a leftist,” play in bands, attend an event, or hang out in radical spaces. The information does not have to be correct or justified for someone to target you. All a harasser needs is one piece of information to begin to seek more details online.
\n\nBeing aware of what information trails you leave online can protect you from law enforcement as well as stalkers. Now that state-imposed surveillance is increasingly sophisticated and livestreaming has become normal at protests, just wearing a mask is often not enough. In June 2020 in Philadelphia, investigators identified a woman starting with nothing more than a blurry photo of her. They followed a trail of breadcrumbs including an Etsy purchase, twitter accounts, and her professional work page. Customs and Border Protection have started to trawl public social media. Securing your online presence can make you feel more secure taking action offline.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/26/6.jpg\")
These days, there are cameras everywhere.
\nThere’s no better time to start than now. After you have been doxxed, you may not be able to eliminate the information that is out there even if you try to get it taken down.
\n\nThere are many different ways to approach this. Obviously, the best way to ensure that no one can find any information about you is to have nothing available—but some people can’t eliminate their online presence, whether because of work, family, or other responsibilities. In some cases, there are strategic reasons to maintain some sort of online persona; for example, having a longstanding, believable but innocuous social media account may be helpful for non-citizens crossing the US border. Thankfully, there are ways to firewall distinct spheres of your life, curate a public profile if you need one, and adopt practices that can help you and your friends to feel empowered to continue taking action in your community. This process can be tedious. It will take time and energy. I recommend doing it together with friends, roommates, or family members to help through some of the difficult or boring aspects.
\n\nIf you cannot completely delete yourself from the internet, you can still preserve relative privacy by maintaining distinct spheres1 of online activity and cleaning up forgotten or infrequently used accounts.
\n\nYou likely have more than one online presence. This could include social networks, message boards, job sites, email accounts—anything you need to log into. Often in doxxing, information is triangulated from many different sources. One way to reduce the amount of information available to doxxers is to partition these spheres so they are not connected to each other. This is a highly individualized process; take some time to consider the following questions and map out your own online spheres.
\n\nDo you spend your time on r/politics or the wall of a Facebook acquaintance debating? Do you frequently like or repost statuses from radical Instagram or Twitter accounts? Do you have images or personal information on job boards? Do you buy things on Etsy or eBay? Do any of your friends post pictures of you on their Instagram accounts? Do you have to promote yourself online for the line of work you are in? Do you connect with your co-workers, family members, and activist friends using the same account? Do you use parts of your real name or birthday for usernames or emails?
\n\nEach of these may not be a problem in and of itself, but together they can create links between different spheres of your life.
\n\nAsk yourself:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/26/10.jpg\")
Don’t forget metadata! In this case, Gustave Courbet’s face is erased, but his signature is clearly visible on the canvas.
\nHere are a few examples of how your online presence can overlap across different sites:
\n\nRelatives
\n\nPolitics
\n\nFriends and Community
\n\nHobbies
\n\nLegal
\n\nCareer
\n\nTake time to consider where you overlap, what your online goals are, and where you can separate these spheres.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/26/4.jpg\")
\nLet’s talk about how to discover what information is available about you, how to identify and eliminate trails, and what online resources exist to remove them.
\n\nBegin with what is publicly available. Google yourself and make a list of all of your social media accounts. Delete old accounts for things you no longer use. This is also a good time to download a password manager like 1Password or LastPass to assist you in managing unique usernames, emails, and passwords.
\n\nFind out what information people can find out about you simply using a search engine. Search for yourself on DuckDuckGo and Google. Try doing this search in incognito mode. Try different versions of your name, with and with out your middle name and in quotation marks. You could set Google Alerts to send you emails when your name is published on the internet. This will give you a sense of how much data about you is available online to people who are not in your network.
\n\nAfter this initial search, have a look at all of the data broker sites that profit on trading in personal data. I also encourage you to remove your closest family members at the same time. This process can be arduous; these sites try to make it as difficult as possible to delete information about yourself. There are some things you can’t remove yourself from—for example, if you recently registered to vote and still live at that address. (This is another reason some people choose not to vote.)
\n\nThe most trafficked host sites include: Been-verified, CheckPeople, Instant Checkmate, Intelius, PeekYou, PeopleFinders, PeopleSmart, Pipl, PrivateEye, PublicRecords360, Radaris, Spokeo, USA People Search, TruthFinder.com, Nuwber, and FamilyTreeNow. I recommend starting by searching yourself on OneRep using the free version of their service—it will show you what sites have your information. Then use that information on this website, which has a guide for opting out of virtually every data broker. If you have more money than time, you can pay OneRep or Just Delete Me to have your information removed, but I usually only recommend this service if you have already been doxxed.
\n\nI recommend starting with these by searching each one on this website,\nwhich has a guide for opting out of virtually every data broker. If you have more money than time, you can pay for a service called Just Delete Me to have your information removed, but I usually only recommend this service if you have already been doxxed.
\n\nWhen you search yourself in a online search engine, you may also find old accounts. It can be good to do a reverse search using all of the old user names and screen names you can remember. Accounts you have not used in a long time can make you vulnerable because if they are using an older password, they can try that account’s technical support to get more data about you that they can try to use for other accounts. Download any material of sentimental value to you and permanently close all the accounts you no longer use. These can be full of clues about your life.
\n\nFirst, go to this website, which searches over hundreds of platforms for specific usernames, and search all the possible usernames and emails you have used. This will tell you what platforms have accounts using that handle.
\n\nSecond, go here and type in the website domain. This website archives a huge array of existing websites, categorizes how easy or difficult they make it to delete an account, and provides the link to the “delete profile” page for each respective site.
\n\nHaveibeenpwned.com will help you find out if there are any data breaches involving any accounts you hold. If there are, take immediate action to change passwords.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/26/7.jpg\")
\nThe easiest way for someone to find more information about you is to search your name, aliases, and usernames. To keep your spheres of internet activity separate, always use a new username when you create an account. If you have a professional website for work and must use you legal name, make sure the email you use for that account is used solely for that purpose. You may have to have a handful of email accounts and usernames. I have one for all of my medical and governmental accounts, one for my online shopping, one for my political life, and one for my social media, another for dating sites, and so on. I use aliases and false information for all the websites that represent me or display photos of me.
\n\nA password manager is a great help for this, as it will store logins for all of your accounts. I recommend LastPass, which you can download for your phone and web browser. It might be tempting to leave yourself permanently signed in, but always make sure to sign out when you are done using it. First, so you don’t forget the master password—and also to ensure that even if someone manages to gain access to your phone or computer, they can’t access all your personal data. Take this time to create new emails and change usernames for all of the accounts you aren’t going to delete. You can easily create new emails using Protonmail. Both 1Password and LastPass can help generate random string passwords, which are the most secure.
\n\nOnce you have eliminated all your loose ends, take a look at what you chose to retain and what can be found there. If you keep any social media accounts, go through your profile and note what people can find out about you. You can choose from a range of strategies regarding how to approach this, depending on how cautious you want to be and how certain are that it is possible to keep your different spheres of internet activity distinct.
\n\nSome of your options include:
\n\nThe Coach from Crash Override Network is a helpful step-by-step guide that links you directly to the privacy settings page for many commonly used social networks. Click “Let’s Get Started” and “Strengthen the security of my online accounts so people can’t break into them as easily,” and follow their guides for all the top social media companies. This guide can also help with other aspects of online security, so after you’ve done that, I recommend finishing the Coach helper and checking out what other resources they offer.
\n\nWhen you think you are done, have a friend try to create a profile based on what information they can find about you while pretending to be a “doxxer” to see if anything you didn’t think of slipped through the cracks. It may be important to periodically check in on what can be found by searching your name every few months.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/26/9.jpg\")
Conduct a “pre-mortem”: if something goes wrong, how will it happen? What are your vulnerabilities?
\nWe do not recommend approaching the police when you are doxxed (or ever). The police may use the information you give them about the harassers, but they will also use the information they get about you and other individuals and groups you may have been publicly associated with. Once that is on file, it’s permanently in their hands, and there’s no guarantee they won’t use it to target you or others with state repression.
\n\nIf you chose to involve the police, please be transparent and do not ask any radical groups to support you. Be sure to inform any groups that you are connected with of your decision. Usually, the police will do nothing or make the situation much worse. The idea of thiis guide is to provide you with alternatives based in community support and empowerment.
\n\nShort answer: Do not immediately react publicly. Take time to secure yourself and alert your networks privately before reacting publicly.
\n\nYour first impulse may be to alert as many people as you can immediately with a public announcement or to shut everything down. Going public in this way can provide you with immediate support if you have a sympathetic audience, but it carries the risk of increased aggression from harassers. There are good arguments for being cautious with information at the beginning. The most important thing to do first is to take steps to protect yourself and your networks against further harm.
\n\nImmediate announcements can complicate your security efforts. Whether or not the information posted about you is accurate, no one is likely to use it to cause you any serious harm without first confirming at least some of it. Posting on a social media account confirming your doxx immediately confirms that the information about you is accurate; it also indicates that you have seen where it was posted and suggests that you are terrified. This furthers the goals of your harassers. They want to intimidate and isolate you. Do not confirm or deny any of the information they have dug up about you, regardless of whether it is false or embarrassing. They are seeking a reaction. If you let them know that what they have posted is incorrect, they may conclude that they are on the right track and they just need to keep digging. Sometimes, one of the most effective initial public responses is no response at all—don’t make any major changes to your posting habits or show any fear. This can send the message that your doxxer missed the mark, and that the attack was a failure.
\n\nAfter you have had time to process your feelings and secure your position, it may be strategic to go public and perhaps to band together with other people who are in a similar situation. You may be able to leverage the public outrage over white supremacists to create a campaign to dissuade further doxxing—for example, make a funding drive with pledges to give money for every harassing email you or others in your community receive! Since your harassers want to isolate you, public support like this may dissuade further intimidation. Try to be creative, resilient, and strategic. Be careful not to endanger anyone else in this process.
\n\nWhen making public statements, if you posture or brag about your abilities, your ability to employ violence, weapons with which you can defend yourself, or overstate your ferociousness, you may bite off more than you can chew. It is generally not a good idea to misrepresent yourself. Talking directly or indirectly to the harassers does not usually improve matters. I recommend making a positive statement asserting your ethics and beliefs, describing how your identity or your ideals have made you a target but maintaining that while these campaigns of harassment are intended to make you cower, you will not do so, because you have no reason to hide your politics. Avoid talking about specific actions or groups, whether or not you are involved with them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/26/1.jpg\")
\nDon’t panic. Call a close friend to come over and help.
\nCreate an incident log and keep records for both online and offline provocations. This is crucial to identifying the patterns of the attacks. It can be useful to compare these with other organizers in order to identify larger patterns so as to identify your opponents and their organizations.
\nAlert your friends, family, and sensitive political networks privately. Task a few friends that you trust with your personal information to help report social media and blog posts that doxx you, identifying them as harassment. Do so repeatedly. Some platforms lack policies that will protect you, even if these posts include accurate personal information, even if they put you in danger. Sometimes, doxxers will use your photos and information to make imposter accounts. It is usually easier to report these as fakes; try to do so quickly in order to prevent them from obtaining more information from your networks by posing as you. You, your family, and your employer may begin to receive threatening or harassing phone calls. Let them know what is happening as quickly as you can and instruct them not to engage with the harassers.
\nShut down the flow of information. If you are reading this section and have not done the preventative care section, begin that process. Download a password manager like 1Password or LastPass and change all of your passwords immediately. You can also pay for a service called Delete Me that will take much of your online footprint off of snoop sites that harvest and display personal information. This service will take care of the information aggregated by the data brokers but not any social media, web accounts, news articles, or arrest records you may have, those will have to be handled on your own. It is important to balance the hemorrhage of information, while also not alerting your harassers that the dox was effective or on target. Try to shore up your social media accounts by making friends lists and information private in order to protect your networks until you are sure that they don’t offer vulnerable personal information to those willing to dig for it. How you react publicly is a very delicate situation and should be handled carefully throughout this process.
\nSet up a safety plan. Recruit friends and family to support you. Let them know what is going on; doxxing can be traumatic and you need to prioritize your mental and physical health so that you can work through these attacks. These conversations can be difficult—especially if they do not understand the nuances of this political moment, if it’s the first time they are hearing about a particular flavor of hate group, or if your relationships are strained due to political or personal differences. If you don’t feel up to it, you could ask a friend who has a good understanding of the situation to have the more difficult conversations for you.
\nIf your home address is included in the doxx, find somewhere new you can stay if you are able. If you can’t leave your home, invite friends or a local security group to stay with you. Make a “go bag” with everything you will need if you have to pack up and go with little notice.
\n\nIf you don’t feel you are at any great risk, especially if your doxx is comprised of freely-available information or is just sent directly to you in an effort to unnerve you, you may feel fine dismissing it as a cheap intimidation tactic, blocking and reporting the harasser, and moving on. It may just be a matter of someone trying to get a rise out of you. However, if your doxx includes sensitive personal information, especially details that are not easy to obtain with simple detective work, or it appears in a public forum where people distribute information in hopes that others will act on it, you may want to take further precautions. This is especially true if you are already part of a targeted group or demographic.
\n\nWhen you learn that you have been doxxed, it’s important to establish which information could translate into credible threats. Often, doxxing is a precursor to more intrusive offline harassment, or is connected with threats to act on the information. This could be anything from threatening phone calls to family or workplaces to pointed death threats or a SWAT call.
\n\nIt is sometimes difficult to determine what makes a threat “credible.” The most common tactic of ordinary doxxers is to send creepy or intimidating messages wherever they think they can reach you—social media, email, and to family members, and the like. They will often imply that they have more information than they really do; it’s common for them to say that they have provided this information to local law enforcement. Their goal is to intimidate you out of acting; often, whatever information they post publically is all that they have.
\n\nYour employer may receive calls demanding that they fire you. Thus far, it is rare that the targets of doxxing have been physically attacked, but it has happened, and it is possible that those who doxx you may make efforts to get your information into the hands of people who are not acting rationally or ethically. It is important to be cautious, but don’t panic or immerse yourself in anxiety.
\n\nAsk yourself:
\n\nIs there information tying you to criminal activity that could get you arrested?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/26/8.jpg\")
\n Here are some things you can do in response to the dangers that can arise from being doxxed:
\n\nThis conversation can be very difficult, especially if your relationship with your family is strained. Have a cool-headed friend on call to help mediate or support you afterwards if necessary.
\n\nThink about how often you are willing to be vulnerable with your family and how much opportunity you will have in the future to follow up on the conversation. If it’s necessary to speak to family members but you feel like you will only get one chance, you can rehearse with a friend and prepare for their reactions. If you have an ongoing, conversational, trusting relationship, you can explain the situation to them in a series of smaller conversations, instead of one long sit-down. Evaluate how much time and how much attention you will have.
\n\nIt has always helped me to frame this as “having a stalker” to people who I do not want to have a political conversation with—that may suffice to explain the severity of the situation and why you need privacy. But it can be worth the effort to be honest about what’s going on. This can help build stronger relationships and demystify this common occurrence, while encouraging others who may not have considered that it could happen to them or someone they know to take online privacy seriously. Most people will respond with fear and sympathy, though sometimes they will suggest or even insist that you call the police.
\n\nThere is no one-size-fits-all approach. In my case, I had to compel my conservative mother to promise that she would not involve the police. I did so by appealing to my right to personal safety and my autonomy as the victim in the situation, asking her to respect my wishes and reminding her that the police can do very little to respond to targeted harassment like this—and all that calling them would do would be to open me up to their scrutiny, since I was being accused of criminal activity. Such conversations can be very difficult, but they are often necessary. Remind your friends and family not to react or respond to any phone calls, emails, or social media requests.
\n\nYou can read a guide for how to discuss this with your employer here.
\n\nThings to remember when talking to your friends and family:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/26/5.jpg\")
If you are targeted for doxxing, communicate clearly with others about the potential consequences of appearing in photographs together.
\nTake a deep breath. Do not blame yourself. Emotionally this can be deeply disturbing and disruptive, adding a layer of acute stress to your life. There may be people out there who know what you look like and you will have no idea who they are. Sometimes information from doxxes becomes a permanent part of the internet if you name is googled; this can affect your job prospects. Sometimes nothing comes from the attention—but there is always the possibility that someone will try to pick up where the last doxxer left off.
\n\nUntil you are sure that your time in the spotlight is over, you may have to alter some aspects of your life. Ask yourself, “What kind of life do I want to live? How can I manage my anxiety? Are there ways I can embrace being a more public figure? How can I feel secure in taking risks and being active again?” Especially as political tensions intensify, it may be important to take more extreme safety measures.
\n\nHere are some of the measures you might choose to employ:
\n\nNo matter how hard the people targeting you try make you feel isolated, you are not in this alone. As a community, we must protect each other and our online networks from harassment, imprisonment, political violence, and intimidation. Together, we can do this.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/26/3.jpg\")
\nFor people with more serious needs to erase and hide:
\n\nExtreme Privacy—What It Takes to Disappear: Data Removal Workbook & Credit Freeze Guide
\n\n\n\n\n\nGet a Password Manager like 1Password or LastPass: You can download it on your phone, computer, and as a browser extension.
\n\nGet a VPN: Riseup offers a free VPN, but the one from Nord is more user-friendly.
\n\nThis podcast presents ideas to help you become digitally invisible, stay secure from cyber threats, and make you a better online investigator.
\n\nThe concept of spheres was developed by the Smiling Faces Collective. ↩
\nOn July 6, fascists attempted to hold a “Demand Free Speech”1 rally in Washington, DC. Anarchists and DC Black Lives Matter mobilized in response. Although the massive police presence hampered what anti-fascists could do, the fascist rally was not a success, confirming that anti-fascists have largely succeeded in thwarting the street-level fascist movement that many feared would emerge in the Trump era. The question, now, is how we can employ the tactics we have popularized in the anti-fascist movement—black blocs, de-platforming, and investigative research—in other movements and contexts.
\n\nHere, we offer a short report from DC on how previous mobilizations in DC have informed the strategies they employ today and an account of the day’s events.
\n\nA group of neo-fascists promised to bring out 1000 people to a rally in Washington, DC on July 6, including 100 or more battle-ready Proud Boys. The rally had big names associated with it and local, institutional, and regional support; the organizers included Enrique Tarrio, chairman of the Proud Boys. Because it was sandwiched between Donald Trump’s 4th of July rally and “Christians United For Israel,” a major gathering of the Christian right, DC anti-fascists feared that this event could draw a much larger turnout than recent far-right events had in the area. If a new right-wing coalition emerged that could put numbers back into the streets, that would mean another round of draining confrontations between fascists and anti-fascists.
\n\nIn the end, the “Demand Free Speech Rally” was disorganized and undermined by infighting. Their event was a bust: it brought out dozens, not a thousand. The Proud Boys, which seemed like the last group standing among the fascist organizations of two years ago, couldn’t muster the 100 attendees they promised. Identity Evropa also made a last-minute push and failed to bring out the numbers they anticipated.
\n\nWhile repugnant characters like Adrienna DiCioccio and Jack Posebiac have huge Twitter followings, that doesn’t translate into an on-the-ground street movement. They are social media grifters who consider a trending hashtag more important than the kind of organizing that can mobilize people. They can use their platforms to create misinformation campaigns that cause police to crack down on anti-fascists, but they lack the relationships, skills, and political savvy to produce mass turnout for their own events.
\n\nOf course, that doesn’t mean they can’t learn those skills. We were not born with those skills either. We have to remain vigilant, mobilizing resistance whenever there is a chance that fascists will succeed in their publicity stunts, so they are never positively reinforced for their efforts to recruit.
\n\nOver the past two and a half years, organizers in DC have learned harsh lessons about the risks of collective action. DC anarchists were shocked when DC police chose to mass-arrest and then mass-prosecute over 200 people for the courageous actions of January 20, 2017. The preceding 10 years of comparatively restrained police tactics had made DC anarchists complacent. We had conceded ground to liberals when we should have been developing strategies that could prepare us for the moment when that scenario changed.
\n\nThe now infamous Anti-Capitalist and Anti-fascist Bloc that responded to the inauguration of Donald Trump was isolated from the majority of people on the street in DC that day, leaving it vulnerable to repression. In setting out to deepen our relations with other social movements, local anarchists aim to ensure that we cannot be isolated from our communities.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/07/17/2.jpg\")
\nOne role the black bloc can play is to defend those who are vulnerable to police attacks. On July 6, the bloc mobilized when we heard a large number of fascists were close to the park; our goal was to preserve space for people from targeted communities.
\n\nJust a year ago, anarchists were asked to stay out of the sites of permitted demonstrations for fear of mass arrests and police violence. Our recent efforts to connect with others have enabled us to make space for anarchist actions in a way that was not possible between 2016 and 2018. Building and deepening relationships takes time, patience, and understanding. We hope that these efforts will equip us to be better prepared for demonstrations in DC in the future, the next time anarchists and anti-fascists mobilize.
\n\nWhen we act, ideally we should be swimming in a sea of people, not alone against the stream of police repression. Different tactics make us stronger and sharing space makes those tactical experiments safer. It’s harder to make a bugaboo out of the black bloc when other people in the streets know who we are and what we are there to do.
\n\nEarlier this year, white gentrifiers demanded that Shaw’s Metro PCS store shut off the music it has been playing for over 20 years. In the 1990s, Metro PCS was rocking Go-Go outside and selling beepers, back when the U Street corridor was known as “Black Broadway.” Formerly known as Chocolate City, DC has been seeing Go-Go events pushed out of the city into Maryland.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/legbacarrefour/status/1147562211025534976\n\n\n
Go-Go is a historically Black music that developed in Washington, DC—a homegrown variant of funk, old-school hip-hop, and R&B music, founded by DC legend Chuck Brown. The disappearance of Go-Go from nearly every neighborhood illustrates the displacement of Black people from DC.
\n\nA massive community-led response to the pressure on Metro PCS brought thousands out to U Street in the face of policing and gentrification. Later in spring 2019, Metro PCS returned Go-Go music to Chuck Brown Way. While police have been shutting down these shows, communities have been using Go-Go dance parties as a form of resistance to gentrification in DC.
\n\nWhen anarchists, Black Lives Matter activists, and local anti-fascists became aware of the right-wing mobilization, we believed it would be important to hold space for Black, Brown, and Indigenous joy in the face of white supremacy. We set out to help bring together social movements in a way that would secure the safety of DC residents and give the protest a specifically DC atmosphere.
\n\nWhile DC organizers believed that this could be a large mobilization, the material force the Proud Boys promised didn’t show. It was a far cry from the “thousand give or take a few hundred” they predicted to the park service.
\n\nLeading up to the mobilization, we intentionally did not discuss their politics. We just branded their event for them, clarifying for everyone that it was part of the same fascist current as previous such demonstrations in DC. A week before the demonstration, public pressure compelled the Spy Museum to publicly denounce the alt-right and cancel their VIP event.
\n\nIn a last-minute attempt to mobilize supporters and escalate the likelihood of right-wing violence, far-right media began circulating rumors about “antifa acid attacks.” Numerous Proud Boys used this opportunity to announce that they planned to carry loaded guns. On the other hand, these rumors also provided cover for several of the speakers to cancel in the face of public pressure from DC antifascists. Jack Posebiac, Mike Cernovich, and Omar Navarrow all backed out before the rally.
\n\nRoger Stone was a no-show. Laura Loomer blamed antifa for the rally ending early. All in all, their rally was logistical failure, with numerous events ending early and lacking attendance.
\n\n10:30 am, at the beginning of the rally—Black Lives Matter organizers explicitly expressed support for the black bloc. “See the people with masks over their faces, and in all black? Those are our people. They are here to keep us safe because police don’t. We keep each other safe.” As the demonstration got underway, crowds gathered against the backdrop of DC’s homegrown funk while anti-fascist speakers from different communities alternated with bands brought in by anti-fascists of color and Black Lives Matter DC.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Julio_Rosas11/status/1147554817524543488\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/ChuckModi1/status/1147556685361405952\n\n\n
Around 11:30 am, as the rally was getting started, groups of right-wing journalists repeatedly attempted to film the demonstration without the consent of organizers or the community at large. Organizers aimed to create an atmosphere characterized by consent and solidarity in which the attendees would actively prevent fascists from attacking community members. At one point, a group of drag queens chased out a group of fascists.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/UR_Ninja/status/1147577101610029056\n\n\n
This began a skirmish between fascists and anti-fascists. As this unfolded, some of them continued heckling and attempting to film. Numerous Proud Boys and their supporters repeatedly came over and were chased away by community members, not just participants in the bloc.
\n\nFor those not in the streets in DC on July 6, the black bloc was hardly the wrecking ball we were on J20. There are no smashed windows to write about, no video clips of Richard Spencer being punched in the face. The most exciting moments of the day were funny rather than inspiring—for example, playing tug of war with police over a newspaper box.
\n\nAround 1:30 pm, the bloc took the streets to confront Identity Evropa, who were a block away from their permitted rally.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/07/17/1.jpg\")
\nOther participants in the movement are no longer seeking to police our actions, but the police are still eager to suppress even the most mundane acts of rebellion.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ChuckModi1/status/1147551469111062529\n\n\n
At 5:30 pm, anarchists, Black Lives Matter, and other rally attendees met up again in front of Trump hotel. Despite hundreds of police, several dozen people were able to hold their ground in front of the VIP Bus, delaying its departure by over an hour and a half. The bus, which was supposed to leave by 6:30, left around 8 pm for an undisclosed location in Northern Virginia.
\n\nIn short, while the day can hardly be said to be a tactical victory, we were able to diminish and contain the threat that the rally posed to our communities. It’s for the best that we didn’t have to physically fight a large group of fascists, in any case.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/07/17/3.jpg\")
\nDays after the #DemandFreeSpeech rally, the “Mother of All Rallies” organizers cancelled their annual pro-Trump demonstration. They cited censorship on social media, but it’s significant that this occurred days after the flop of the “free speech” demonstration.
\n\nWhen we think about the future—about how to make sure we gain strength and our opposition lays dormant—we need to reflect on the limitations we have experienced in this era and how to make sure we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.
\n\nIn many different mobilizations, we have repeatedly confronted the same issues. When there is a small minority of people who feel comfortable standing up to the police, how do we relate to others who are not prepared to? How do we address the questions of timing and the safety of participants both inside and outside the bloc? When should we push the envelope, and when should we play a supporting role?
\n\nIf we want to increase our ability to act and build relationships with other revolutionary movements, these are important questions. But we can think bigger about what we do next. How do we push for militant resistance in the face of border militarization, concentration camps, police killing, and state violence? How do we take the focus from individual fascists towards state-sanctioned racial violence.
\n\nAs we look forward to replicating the success of mass anti-fascism, we can look to use the skills we’ve built in other arenas. The Republican Party’s vision, while not quite as overt as Richard Spencer’s program, still includes systemic ethnic cleansing and concentration camps for children. How can we map the relationships that create these policies? How can we build campaigns that make it unpopular to support racialized policing and mass incarceration? How do we use research, counter-intelligence, social mapping, and street militancy against ICE and prisons? How do we use these skills in mutual aid projects as well?
\n\nOn one hand, we have to build the ability to sustain and intensify our offensive organizing. On the other hand, we have to support each another through crisis capitalism.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/07/17/5.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/07/17/6.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/07/17/7.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/07/17/8.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/07/17/9.jpg\")
\nRather than the kind of state-enforced “freedom of speech” in which armored riot police bludgeon the general population while fascists call for even more violence, anarchists seek real freedom, in which communities can self-organize to defend against the violence of police and fascists alike. ↩
\n![Never Again Is Now](\"https://black-mosquito.org/media/resized/1170x658/ves/blog/never-again-is-now.jpg\"){kind=link}
![Protesters](\"https://media.washtimes.com/media/image/2020/07/20/APTOPIX_Racial_Injustice_Portland_32735.jpg-fc00b.jpg\"){kind=link}