![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/09/04/5.jpg\")
No dignity in fascism.
\nIn the three weeks since anarchists helped shut down the largest fascist rally the US has seen in decades, the pendulum has swung back and forth between new public support for anti-fascist organizing and a dishonest, fearmongering reaction spearheaded by the extreme center that plays right into the hands of far-right elements in the police and FBI. Now, fascists are shifting towards a strategy of decentralized attacks while the Trump administration prepares a new racist offensive against nearly a million residents of the United States. It’s more pressing than ever to learn from our victories in order to strategize for the next round. We spoke with a participant in the front lines of the clashes in Charlottesville about why an under-equipped anti-fascist contingent was able to defeat a more numerous body of fascists, how to halt the creep towards authoritarianism, and what courage means in these struggles.
\n\nIn Charlottesville, on Friday night, August 11, if the torchlit march had not encountered any protesters around the monument or elsewhere—if it had been able to proceed without meeting any opposition—what do you think the consequences would have been?
\n\nWell, it’s easy to be doctrinaire when you’re speculating. I mean, any time fascists do something provocative without opposition, it sets a new baseline for them. It’s like, “Oh, marching with torches and chanting ‘Blood and Soil’ is a pretty low-key thing to do, let’s always do that at our gatherings from now on. It’s fun and easy!” But I think it strengthens their movement even more when they encounter opposition that they can easily defeat, which is what actually happened on Friday. If that had been the only event in Charlottesville, or if the rest of the weekend had gone the same way, it would have been a gift to their movement.
\n\nI try to imagine the perspective of a fresh young recruit. You know he’s posturing and puffing himself up, but he’s nervous too. He feels awkward putting on that white polo shirt, he feels nervous carrying a torch at first. But then he sees everyone around him doing the same thing, his voice is amplified by a hundred voices saying the same words as him, and that nervousness turns into elation. So right there, his body learns an important lesson: “When I feel scared, these are the people who make me safe. When I feel weak, these are the people who make me strong.” This is like church, you know. That whole process happens even if not a single counterprotestor shows up. He already knows that most of the world is against him.
\n\nIf there’s tangible, physical opposition, the nervousness is going to be more intense, but so is that gut-level lesson learned from a victory. So when we confront these things, we should recognize that we’re raising the stakes. I think groups like SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center) fixate on that side of things when they try to discourage people from counterprotesting. I think their attitude is, we can’t do anything about these young men’s acculturation into hate groups, but we can deny them opportunities to really get hardened. Or maybe they think that acculturation happens in internet forums, not torch marches. I don’t know. I think anarchists sometimes understand this process better than sociologists, because we’ve been through something similar, in subcultural spaces or street marches or whatever.
\n\nAlso we’re not static. Even when we take a loss that strengthens the movement we’re fighting against, it can strengthen us too. Friday 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. If no one had showed up to oppose them on Friday, maybe we would have made worse mistakes the next day, against a sharper adversary. There’s no way to know.
\n\nWhy were anti-fascists not as prepared to respond on Friday night? Can you say anything about the motivations of those who still chose to confront the torchlit march?
\n\nThe details of that march were announced much later, that’s the main thing. Also I think some kinds of counter-protestors are always going to stay away from a nighttime event like that, because it’s more likely to be crazy. Some people were prepared, but it was just different situations.
\n\nI do think Friday highlighted one weakness we have right now, which is that we don’t share much common culture around assessing our group capacity in the heat of the moment. I’ve seen this at other events too. Some of us are used to quietly running the numbers when we’re in a crowd, asking ourselves, you know, what are the odds we can successfully unarrest people if there are issues with the police? Or what are the odds we can physically prevent this group of white supremacists from reaching their destination? That kind of thing. And adjusting the approach accordingly. Other people, maybe people who aren’t drawing on the same kinds of street experience or think of their goals differently, seem to approach those questions morally rather than situationally. Like, we must not let them reach their destination, therefore we shall not let them reach their destination.
\n\nI’m not saying there’s one single correct way to look at it, but if we’re not having those conversations constructively outside of these crisis moments, it’s not good. Those conversations are part of building a strong movement culture.
\n\n No dignity in fascism.
\nOn Saturday, it appeared that counter-demonstrators were outmatched by fascists in terms of muscle mass, equipment, numbers, and terrain. It was a terrifying situation. Yet anti-fascists did unexpectedly well in the confrontations. What do you attribute this to?
\n\nYou mean we did unexpectedly well, right? I think antifascists had a deeper understanding of diversity of tactics. The presence of counterprotestors with a personal commitment to nonviolence was important, I think, and so were the diverse approaches of those who did use physical force, I mean as far as acting more offensively or defensively.
\n\nUnite the Right was all about image. They wanted three things: 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\nSide note, we made a conscious decision not to do Saturday in black bloc. I think that helped in the specific circumstances.
\n\nSo diversity of tactics, yeah. A 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 counterprotestor, 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\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/09/04/4.jpg\")
Fascists were better equipped than counter-protestors in Charlottesville, yet failed to gain the upper hand.
\nSome have reported that it was very important that there were guns on the anti-fascist side of the conflict, to discourage fascists from escalating past a certain degree of force. Others have expressed concern about whether guns can be a useful tool in struggles for liberation. Coming away from Charlottesville, what is your impression?
\n\nI don’t know if guns were an important deterrent as the day wore on. Maybe they were early on before things really started, when we were just milling around several blocks away. Realistically, if a Nazi had started shooting later in the rally no one would have had a clear shot before he emptied his clip, and once that gunfire started the crossfire would be hellish. So I guess it depends what kind of threat you think was deterred. Probably the deterrent effect was a factor in the open areas where more one-on-one fights happened—you might not pull a knife in the open if you think there’s a chance you’re being covered. But on that topic, the possibility of getting stabbed makes you pretty careful too. We were all thinking about Sacramento.
\n\nI can see an argument that the possibility of handguns mixed in the crowd would discourage the guys with shields and clubs from rushing in too aggressively. Maybe it put more pressure on them to stay in very tight formation, which limits how aggressive you can get with a club. I’m just speculating here, I still think the concern with image was a bigger factor for them. Anyway, that’s different from the militia style, open carry rifles.
\n\nI guess I did see a neo-Confederate man in the front lines reach for his pistol and then change his mind when we yelled that he had a gun. He settled for an extendable baton instead. So that’s an example where knowing that you can be identified and targeted will convince you to keep your own weapon holstered. That deterred him from brandishing a gun, though. He really did have a self-defense mentality, even if it was a racist, delusional one, and he was going to pull his gun to “deter” the mob he was facing. It would have been very different if his primary goal was to kill people.
\n\nAs soon as you start talking deterrence, you’re talking about an arms race. I think that’s a danger whether it’s guns, knives, or plexiglass shields. You lose the social character of the struggle and you lose the diversity of tactics. I don’t mind being around assault rifles, but I do mind the paramilitary mentality. We’re susceptible to that mentality when fear clouds our thinking.
\n\nIf you get into an arms race with a bunch of scared people who have little or no experience of gun violence—I’m talking about antifascists as well as the alt fascists, we’re scared too—you’re creating an extremely volatile situation. All it takes is one jumpy person pulling a trigger.
\n\nProbably the only thing you can do is think very concretely about what you’re trying to deter. Reflect. It has to be based in experience, yours or a mentor’s or something, and it has to be real about the big picture. Otherwise, you’ve just got a very risky security blanket.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ACLUVA/status/901572207079555073\n \n
Do you have any thoughts about what approaches we should expect fascists to take in the wake of Charlottesville?
\n\nIt’s a dangerous time. They’ve already lost the battle to look like victims, so some of them will be happy to look like successful aggressors. That could certainly mean they go in the direction of clandestine attacks, but it could also mean they show up at these things looking like Roman legionnaires and they rush us first, hard. Our best defense is numbers, which maybe we have now. Obviously, there are tactical questions for us too.
\n\nOn the other hand, some of them may try to move back toward a mass movement, and away from the fringe. They might stick to being the “pro-white bloc” at Trump rallies.
\n\nWhat do the events in Charlottesville mean for the strategy of Richard Spencer, who seeks to popularize a new “respectable” white supremacy?
\n\nHe lost. His strategy lost. The president tried running interference for him, but it didn’t work. I mean, these suit-and-tie Nazis can’t change their character overnight, so they’ll keep trying the same rhetoric, but it’s going to be a dwindling audience.
\n\nOn the other hand, that rhetoric does enable young alt-right recruits to remain in denial about what they’re signing up for. For the most part, they think they’re the Freikorps, but not the Final Solution. We should also remember, again, that clashes like the ones we’ve been seeing can harden these kids. So the ones who don’t drop out because of fear or shame are becoming a more dangerous kind of cadre. The respectability strategy is basically over, but the same individuals can now go about consolidating their gains.
\n\nCan anti-fascists take credit for the ouster of Stephen Bannon? Will his return to Breitbart and the grassroots far right embolden fascists and give them more momentum? Beyond the obvious strategy of “no platform for fascists,” what role should anti-fascist activity play in our struggle against the state, the chief implementer of totalitarian measures?
\n\nThat’s a lot of questions! Bannon? I don’t really care who takes credit for his career change, but I don’t really see it emboldening the far right. You know, the Democrats want to tell it like Charlottesville got Bannon kicked out, because that shifts the focus back to the Oval Office and out of the streets. It might have. I don’t know. I’m glad he’s out, but it’s not my focus. I’m not sure he cares whether he’s directing his movement from inside the institutions or from outside.
\n\nWhat I anticipate is that he’ll try to create a home for all the young people who don’t want to go to Nazi rallies anymore, he’ll push this “alt-left” nonsense, basically he’ll try to do a better version of Richard Spencer’s strategy. That means no Nazis, no Klansmen, just nice Midwestern church people who wouldn’t mind seeing the police gun us down. I’m not sure the momentum is with him now, but we’ll see.
\n\nOkay, about the state… We’re still in the midst of an authoritarian backlash in the broader culture, alongside the white backlash. Trump draws on it, but so do his opponents. If you’re trying to get a popular mandate for authoritarian governance, you present yourself as the only force able to contain irreconcilable, violent conflicts within society. That’s what Trump was doing when he talked about the “many sides” of violence in Charlottesville, and I’m sure that’s what his centrist opposition will do when they try to replace him.
\n\nThere’s two ways to respond as an anti-authoritarian. You can double down on the irreconcilable social conflicts, and say it’s our job to bring them out into the open and fight consciously from the side of the exploited, you know, refuse an oppressive social peace. Or you can dispute the state’s claim that it can resolve people’s conflicts better than we can resolve them on our own. Who does it serve when we perceive our conflicts as irreconcilable, and why do we have to listen to those voices?
\n\nRight now, people like Bannon are pushing a vision of a society threatened by deep, irreconcilable conflicts, but they’re not the conflicts a leftist would talk about. They’re citizen vs. alien, West vs. Islam, and so on. We can push for a different way of seeing the structural divisions in our society, and put our bodies on the line for those beliefs, but if that’s all we do we’re giving a lot of ground to authoritarians who want to be the neutral party. I’m talking about mom-n-pop authoritarians, not just the deep state. So I think we have to bring the idealist side of anarchism with us too, don’t just challenge the analysis of our society’s real conflicts, but challenge the state’s claim to protect us from each other. Challenge the belief that we have always needed protection from each other, and always will.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/09/04/2.jpg\")
We must not let clashes like the one in Charlottesville confirm the right-wing narrative that mutually beneficial coexistence is impossible.
\nIn Europe, one of the anarchist critiques of antifascism has been that it obscures the necessity of struggle against the state, capitalism, and other forms of domination. Do you see this as a risk in the US? Why or why not?
\n\nWhat do you mean “obscures the necessity of struggle”? Like we imagine that as soon as the last Nazi is killed, capitalism and the state will come crumbling down of their own accord, and trans women won’t have to worry about getting randomly murdered for their gender? I don’t see that risk. If you just mean that antifascism can tie down anarchists and keep them from prioritizing the work they really believe in, well of course it can. It’s a defensive struggle. Defense only works if you’re poised to counterattack, and our best counterattack will always be liberatory social movements.
\n\nWhat I do see is that our experiences of struggle deeply shape our imagination. That’s true whether your experience is rioting, or community organizing, or fighting Nazis, or just daily survival in a world that wants to erase you. You start to imagine the whole revolution as just whatever struggle you’re used to, but on a larger scale. And then maybe you’re just limited by your learned instincts and the culture you build up around them.
\n\nThat may be a problem for the generation that’s been radicalized in the Trump era. There’s the potential for a kind of creeping authoritarianism on the left, the revolutionary left I mean. You know, that whole mythology of the militant… it can obscure the necessity of struggle against—not the state of today, but the state of tomorrow.
\n\nBut you know, we have a choice about that. We don’t have to be determined by our experiences, even if we’re shaped by them. We can have a more expansive vision of struggle. We can choose what we’re struggling for.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/09/04/1.jpg\")
The site of Heather Heyer’s death.
\nClearly, it takes a lot of courage to physically confront armed fascists. What does courage mean for antifascists? What kind of courage should we be trying to cultivate? What are the risks of focusing on courage as a value?
\n\nCourage is being willing to die for the sake of victory. That’s a straightforward definition. And that is exactly what happened in Charlottesville. One of us died, and we had a victory. That might sound inspiring to some people, but to me it’s fucking nauseating, it makes me want to cry. I mean, I didn’t know Heather, I don’t know if she was preparing herself for the possibility of death. She’s not around to tell us if she wants to be a hero. I do know that some of us entered that weekend consciously accepting that we might die, or that our comrades and loved ones might die. When you take on that kind of mindset, it leaves some scars. I just can’t think about this question in an abstract way.
\n\nSome people talk about courage like it’s just a matter of inner righteousness or integrity or something. I disagree with that idea. You can be a person of great integrity, ready to go through the fire for your beliefs, but when it comes time to use the weapons at your disposal you’re too hesitant to make a contribution. Our understanding of courage should capture that readiness to step forward and act without guarantees. That’s why I say it’s about victory.
\n\nThis isn’t about violence versus nonviolence. Some of the most courageous people I saw in Charlottesville were not throwing punches; they were dressing wounds, or praying, or standing solitary in front of a line of advancing riot cops. Those people were all using the weapons at their disposal.
\n\nI guess the risk is that courage alone can’t guide you. I mean, courageous soldiers can fight imperialist wars, but that doesn’t make them right. Honor and sacrifice can fuel a spiral of meaningless violence. Sometimes the things that make you hesitate when you shouldn’t are also the things that make you reassess your direction when really you should.
\n\nIf you want to back way up and look at it, courage is a warrior value, and anarchism is a peace movement. I mean that in the very simple sense that it’s about people treating each other right without being forced to. That’s peace. Obviously, there’s fighting involved too. I’m just not convinced that the things that make us strong in the face of adversity are always the things that make us good to one another, or that being ready for war makes you ready for peace. Maybe that just comes back to making sure that your vision of victory is really worth dying for.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/09/04/3.jpg\")
People in Oakland rallying in solidarity with those who fought fascism in Charlottesville.
\nFollowing the clashes in Charlottesville and the massive anti-fascist demonstrations afterwards in Durham, Boston, and the Bay Area, the struggle against fascism has arrived in the consciousness of the general public. Tens of thousands of people are realizing that the fight against fascism didn’t end in 1945—that today, as increasingly authoritarian governments collude with ascendant fascist movements, this battle is more pressing than ever.
\n\nIt’s worth taking a moment to review what anti-fascists have accomplished since Trump was elected. Despite harassment and attacks from fascists and law enforcement, what was initially a few hundred people without financial resources or sponsors has grown into the foundation for a massive social movement. On April 15, fascists rampaged through Berkeley, recording video footage of themselves beating people to use for recruiting purposes. On Sunday, August 27, the same fascists attempted to hold another rally in Berkeley. In response to the murder of Heather Heyer during a fascist rally in Charlottesville two weeks prior, thousands of people converged to make the fascist demonstration impossible.
\n\nImagine if the “Unite the Right” rally had taken place without resistance, and a thousand white supremacists had been able to march around Charlottesville unopposed. In that scenario, emboldened fascists could have presented themselves as a legitimate part of the political spectrum, while preparing the way for more murders like the ones in Charleston and Portland. In that case, the government with Trump at the helm would be able to present itself as the only possible solution to fascist violence, and the general public would be forced to seek assistance from the very authorities that are already implementing most of the white supremacist agenda. We should be grateful that long before Charlottesville, forward-thinking anti-fascists were doing the thankless work of monitoring fascists and mobilizing against them.
\n\nBut now that the struggle against fascism has arrived on a massive scale, it’s time to come to grips with the limitations the movement faces today. Every victory generates new challenges. Let’s explore the obstacles that the anti-fascist movement will have to overcome to succeed in creating a world free of authoritarianism.
\n\nThis article is available as a zine you can print out and distribute in your community.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/29/1.jpg\")
Not your grandfather’s anti-fascism.
\nThe Washington Post titled their coverage of Sunday’s demonstration “Black-clad antifa members attack peaceful right-wing demonstrators in Berkeley.” It is not surprising when Fox News publishes barefaced propaganda describing the organizer of far-right demonstrations that have included at least one fascist murderer as a “prayer activist,” but it is more unsettling to see fascist talking points parroted by supposedly liberal outlets.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/29/4.jpg\")
Scaremongering from the corporate media.
\nThe image at the top of the Washington Post article shows a right-wing demonstrator apparently being shoved by an anti-fascist with a shield. Yet several videos show the same far-right demonstrator pepper-spraying anti-fascist demonstrators without provocation and then pepper-spraying people at random immediately before the photo was taken. If you look closely, the attacker is wearing a shirt that celebrates Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet for murdering dissidents by dropping them out of helicopters. If you look closer, you can see that the anti-fascist in the picture has a stick, but is choosing not to use it, instead simply using a shield to block the fascist with the pepper-spray from carrying out further attacks. In fact, the Washington Post chose to use a photo in which the assailant’s right hand is not visible, so readers would not see the pepper spray he holds in it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/29/7.jpg\")
Take a closer look.
\n\nhttps://twitter.com/shane_bauer/status/901910367239938048\n\n\n
When the Washington Post portrays such fascists as “peaceful,” suggesting that they are victims even as they attack people and glorify mass murder, this gives them legitimacy, securing space for them to recruit and to promote and organize further attacks. Why would liberal media outlets do this?
\n\nJournalists often determine the substance of their story in advance, and it appears that media outlets across the spectrum had determined in advance to report the anti-fascist demonstration in Berkeley as an expression of violent excess even before it happened. In the event, the demonstration was largely peaceful; even the worst clashes were considerably less violent than the fighting on April 15. Despite this, corporate media outlets that had ignored April 15 altogether devoted considerable space to a few isolated incidents in which anti-fascists scuffled with fascists or other Trump supporters.
\n\nThe intention was clearly to impose a limit on the amount of popular legitimacy anti-fascists would be permitted to accrue after the events in Charlottesville. Two weeks of positive coverage of anti-fascists, during which various members of the clergy came forward to praise their efforts, were deemed to be too much. Heather Heyer’s murder had taken corporate media by surprise, interrupting their conventional narratives and proving that the threat anti-fascists had supposedly been blowing out of proportion was all too real. It took corporate editors two weeks to regain control of the discourse. As soon as they did, they reimposed their old stereotypes as if Heather had never been killed.
\n\nThis should put an end to any illusions we might have had that corporate media could side with anti-fascists. Outlets like the Washington Post aspire to position themselves against both Trump and his adversaries in the streets—to occupy what some call “the extreme center.” They are gambling that the current polarization of society is temporary, that they can be the beneficiaries of disillusionment with both sides.
\n\nAnti-fascists have to strategize about how to organize and legitimize our efforts to the general public without the benefit of positive media coverage. This is no easy task. At the minimum, it will demand our own grassroots media, at the same time that this media is under systematic assault from right-wing trolls.
\n\nThis challenge is symptomatic of the larger phenomenon of polarization, which is worth examining separately.
\n\nUS society has been splintering and polarizing for years now, since the recession of 2008 if not before. The movement against police and white supremacy that burst onto the national stage in Ferguson in 2014 as Black Lives Matter generated a far-right backlash, which inspired a resurgence of anti-fascist organizing. In response, fascists gave angry liberals and anti-fascists a central place in their strategy, seeking to provoke them into reactive behavior that could be used to further mobilize the right-wing base. Milo Yiannopoulos used this strategy until it blew up in his face last February, when a black bloc of hundreds shut down his event in Berkeley.
\n\nVarious fascist and fascist-friendly organizers also used this approach, baiting leftists and anti-fascists with a series of “free speech” rallies in Berkeley, Portland, and elsewhere around the country that won the nascent fascist movement notoriety and momentum. This movement appeared fully formed for the first time in Charlottesville—but the shockwaves of that debut drew many more people into the movement against fascism, changing the balance of power once again. The “free speech” rallies scheduled afterwards in Boston and the Bay Area were total washouts for the fascists.
\n\nIn each of these cases, when the pendulum of polarization swung to one side, the opposing side was able to use the specter of that victory to draw more sympathizers into action. With the media narrative coming out about Berkeley, the pendulum has again swung away from anti-fascists to benefit the right-wing reaction.
\n\nSo long as this pattern persists, every anti-fascist victory will produce an even greater threat from the far-right and the government. To break out of the pattern, anti-fascists have to strike blows in ways that don’t enable fascists to cash in on the resulting fear among right-wingers, or else to find a way to draw in large swathes of the population more rapidly than their competition on the right. We can offer a few hypotheses about how to accomplish this.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/29/2.jpg\")
Anti-fascists in Dallas, Texas.
\nThe allegation that fascists and anti-fascists are equally bad has been advanced most famously by Donald Trump himself in his response to the events in Charlottesville. He suggested that the problem was an “egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides,” refusing to say a word about the fascists who murdered Heather Heyer. This should tell us something about those who describe fascists and anti-fascists as symmetrical.
\n\nTo equate those who fight for freedom and equality with those who want an autocratic state to enforce hierarchies is to reserve all legitimacy for the state alone—which is itself an autocratic position. It means celebrating the legalism of passive spectators over the heroes who fought the rise of dictatorships in Italy, Germany, Spain, Chile, Greece, and a hundred other nations. It means congratulating those who keep their hands clean while their neighbors are rounded up and imprisoned, deported, or killed.
\n\nWe have to become adept at spelling out the ethical differences between fascism and anti-fascism, and all the justifications for forms of direct action that can actually be effective in this struggle. We need allies from many different walks of life who can help us make this case to the public at large.
\n\nUnfortunately, we can’t count on everyone on the Left to behave responsibly. In “How ‘Antifa’ Mirrors the ‘Alt-Right,’” the same Chris Hedges who assisted the state in dividing and repressing the Occupy movement reappears to perform the same service in relation to the movements against fascism and the Trump administration.
\n\nThe irony of a war journalist perennially accusing others of being driven by a lust for adrenaline should not be lost on anyone. It is worse still that Hedges, as a journalist, arrogates himself the right to pass judgment on the events in Charlottesville from a distance rather than deferring to people like Cornel West who were actually there putting their bodies on the line. But the true irony here is that Hedges purports to be warning against precisely the problem that he himself is creating. “By brawling in the streets,” Hedges alleges, “antifa allows the corporate state… to use the false argument of moral equivalency to criminalize the work of all anti-capitalists.” Actually, it is Hedges who is equipping the state to do this, by attributing “the same lust for violence” to anti-fascists that he believes motivates fascists. He could just as easily use his soapbox to debunk this moral equivalency, but he lacks the moral courage—he simply cannot resist performing the same kind of “self-advertisement for moral purity” that he accuses others of.
\n\nIn 2012, when the authorities needed a narrative with which to isolate the ungovernable elements of the Occupy movement, Hedges provided that narrative, and the FBI subsequently parroted it verbatim in their efforts to justify a series of entrapment cases. Now Hedges is providing Trump’s government exactly the same service, equipping them to declare “antifa” a terrorist organization, as many on the far right have already been demanding. Already, the mayor of Berkeley is calling for “antifa” to be designated as a gang—imagine if everyone who opposes the rise of fascism is classified as a gang member, or a terrorist!
\n\nHedges needs to understand that it is not anti-fascists gaining ground that brings about fascist attacks and government crackdowns. If anti-fascists were not gaining power in the streets, fascists would still be taking advantage of the despair and resentment of poor whites, and the government would still be developing more means of repression—there would simply be no social movement to protect us from them. It is fundamentally paranoid, disempowering, and ahistorical to understand these developments as the result of anti-fascist activity. On the contrary, it is imperative that we build the capacity to act effectively in the streets before the fascists outstrip us and the government is able to centralize enough power to establish tyranny once and for all.
\n\nAll that said, we also need to avoid offering our enemies on the Left and Right alike the opportunity to present us as a mirror image of our fascist adversaries. Let’s explore some ways we can go about this.
\n\nOn one hand, it has been extremely useful for people in the US to learn from anti-fascist movements in other parts of the world. At the same time, the wholesale uncritical introduction of European models has created problems, chief of which is the containment of the struggle against fascism within a discrete identity, “antifa.” It has been a tremendous boon to the far right that they can describe anti-fascists without having to spell out the entire word “fascist”—it helps them to avoid the question of why anyone would oppose resisting fascism.
\n\nIn German, abbreviations are common: national socialist becomes Nazi, anti-fascist becomes antifa. But in English, especially to those not familiar with the history of German anti-fascist struggles, the word antifa can appear alien and off-putting. At its worst, the German antifa movement has tended towards subcultural insularity; this is the last thing we need in the US, locked in a massive struggle with fascists and the government itself—a struggle we can only hope to win if ever-wider segments of the population are drawn over to our side of the barricades.
\n\nIdentity is fundamentally about distinguishing oneself from others. Anti-fascism, however, is for everybody. We should be careful not to insulate it within a particular demographic with a specific dress code and lingo. This is paramount because the far right are scrambling to depict antifa as a monolithic, hostile, alien organization. Our task is not just to build a network of groups, but to create an anti-fascist momentum that will spread contagiously throughout society at large, along with the critiques and tactics necessary for this fight. Specific antifa groups and the cultural cache of “antifa” itself can be useful in that project, as can black bloc tactics, provided we evaluate them as tools for achieving particular objectives rather than expressions of identity or belonging.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/29/3.jpg\")
One of countless European solidarity demonstrations in memory of Heather Heyer, who was murdered in Charlottesville.
\nAs the conflict between fascists and anti-fascists intensifies, we are seeing more and more guns in the streets. Some people who were in Charlottesville reported that it was good that there were guns on both sides: it discouraged fascists from escalating physical conflicts past a certain point. Others report that most of the anti-fascists openly bearing arms were located some distance from the clashes. Some people who were in Ferguson at the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement say that without the threat of gunfire from the locals, the police would never have permitted the demonstrations to happen. Others who experienced the trauma of having their loved ones shot before them counsel that the consequences of bringing guns into street conflict are weightier than most people can imagine.
\n\nParticipants in the Syrian revolution report that for the first several months, the revolt created an open space of debate and possibility in which many people of different walks of life participated. Later, after the conflict escalated, power among the rebels accrued in the hands of religious fundamentalists, as they were the only ones who were able to consistently acquire military supplies—and from that point on, the horizon of liberation and transformation was closed. Sometimes, such escalation is inescapable, even if it closes the door to future possibilities; in any case, it is better to prepare for it now than to be suddenly caught flatfooted. But if our goal is to carry out a revolution rather than to fight in a civil war, we should not hurry the process of escalation—we should drag it out as long as we can. Most of the social changes we want to see cannot be brought about by guns.
\n\nLikewise, we should not imagine that coercive force can solve everything, nor permit fascists and state repression to put us so on edge that we see enemies everywhere we look and begin to attack people when it is not strategic. In the words of an elder anti-fascist veteran from Germany, fascist violence aims to exterminate, while anti-fascist violence aims to educate. We should not hurry to put fascist martyrs in the ground next to Heather Heyer. We must never risk coming across as bullies. It must always be clear that we are here to protect the public at large, not to assert our own authority. When we are compelled to use coercive force, we must make sure that the ways we do so don’t centralize power or legitimacy within our own movement.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/29/5.jpg\")
Anti-fascists in Berkeley on Sunday behind a banner reading “Avenge Charlottesville / Defend your community.”
\nIn the wake of Heather Heyer’s murder, signs appeared at vigils and rallies reading “White Supremacy is Terrorism.” While it is understandable that people wish to condemn her murder in the strongest possible terms, it is dangerous to use the language of terrorism to do so.
\n\nThe framework of terrorism is constructed by the state to define who has the right to employ violence and who doesn’t. When we denounce white supremacists as terrorists, we mimic the verbiage of Senator Cory Gardner, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and Paul Ryan, Republican Speaker of the House.
\n\nTerrorist is used to designate those who are beyond the state’s control and cannot be brought into political alignment with the state. This explains why Heather’s murderer has not been charged with terrorism, while many anarchists who did not so much as scratch someone have received terrorism charges over the past decade and a half.
\n\nUsing the rhetoric of the state reinforces frameworks and narratives that the authorities will ultimately use against us. This is dangerous to our movements and constitutes a betrayal of comrades engaged in struggles we’re often aligned with. Palestinians are labeled terrorists to delegitimize their struggle against the Israeli state. Like the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, the YPG and YPJ in Rojava have been labeled terrorists. The language and ideology of the “war on terror” were carefully introduced into US political discourse in order to prepare the ground for the catastrophic invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
\n\nThe word terrorism comes to us from the Jacobin government’s brutal and merciless rule in France in the 1790s—the term was invented to describe their “reign of terror” during which thousands were executed. Even though the word was coined for the Jacobins and they wore it proudly as a badge, some historians today argue that the Jacobins weren’t terrorists because they were a state entity with legitimate power. This should give us a sense of the extent to which the discourse of terrorism serves to give the state carte blanche while delegitimizing all who stand against it.
\n\nSunday’s far-right rally in Berkeley was promoted under the slogan “No to Marxism in America.” As with the far-right “March against Sharia,” there is no danger of the United States coming under a Marxist government any time soon. Like all totalitarians, fascists desperately need enemies even more oppressive than themselves to point to in order to convince people to join their ranks. There is an ominous symmetry between groups like ISIS and Western fascists, some of whom openly fantasize about a “White Sharia.” This explains their obsession with authoritarian Marxism.
\n\nIn fact, the fiercest opposition to contemporary fascist organizing has not come from authoritarian Marxists, but from anarchists who oppose state power itself. This is inconvenient for many fascists in the US, who still need to present themselves as enemies of “big government” in order to appeal to US Libertarians and traditional conservatives.
\n\nIf fascists are eager to paint all their domestic opponents with the broad brush of Marxism, we should not hasten to assist them. Yes, authoritarian Marxists have historically played a role in the fight against fascism, but they have hardly played it honorably. They began by betraying and undermining other social movements as early as 1871. If Stalin hadn’t sabotaged anti-fascist participants in the Spanish Civil War and other movements around Europe and then concluded a pact with Hitler, the Second World War would have unfolded much differently, and it might not have taken decades afterwards for grassroots liberation movements to recover.
\n\nBoth fascism and authoritarian Marxism are experiencing a small resurgence today. Much of this is taking place among people who grew up after the fall of the Berlin Wall, who are too young to have grandparents who lived through the Second World War. For many in the United States, totalitarianism is abstract, something to joke about on the internet. Some people on the Left see the hammer and sickle the way many right-wingers see the swastika: as a provocative meme rather than a blood-drenched symbol of oppression. Yet Stalin, too, carried out ethnic cleansing, as have many other authoritarian Marxist regimes.
\n\nOne cannot consistently oppose fascism without opposing all forms of authoritarian government. This is not to say that rank-and-file members of authoritarian communist organizations can never be comrades in this struggle. Many of them are sincere people with the best of intentions—and clearly we need all the comrades we can get when we are facing down Nazis with guns. The point is that anti-fascists should oppose the leadership of authoritarian Marxist parties for many of the same reasons that we oppose fascists and other authoritarians. If you care about a member of an organization like the Bolshevik Party, you can express that care by making sure that his organization never comes to power—for if history is any guide, he will be the next up against the wall after you.
\n\nWe must make it clear to the general public that we do not intend to impose a new dictatorship, but only to open and preserve spaces of freedom. There is no statist solution for tyranny.
\n\nUnfortunately, Heather Heyer is not the first person to be taken from us by fascist violence, and she will not be the last. In addition to being wary of the discourse of terrorism and the tendency to militarize our struggles, we should be wary of the discourse of martyrdom and tendency to celebrate death in battle. We need to find ways to remember people above all for who they were, for what their lives gave to the world, not for how they died or what their deaths meant to the struggle. We should not begin to regard ourselves or each other as playing pieces to be exchanged for strategic gains.
\n\nWe live in a society in which aging and death are concealed from most of us. If this struggle continues to intensify, more and more of us will be forced to learn what it is like to spend hard weeks in the hospital, to meet at funerals as well as outside jails and courtrooms. We should approach this as another opportunity to come to know ourselves and each other better, to recognize what is beautiful and worthwhile in life—the things for which we are fighting in the first place. We should not subordinate ourselves to the struggle, but recognize it as one of the ways that life pours forth abundantly within us.
\n\nThe vast majority of the anti-fascist struggle does not take place in street confrontations. It takes place in how we raise our children; it takes place in the hard conversations at workplaces and family dinners; it takes place in the ways we relate to our neighbors, the ways we understand togetherness and belonging. To triumph, we have to make it possible for people of all genders and ethnicities and religions to work together to survive the ordeals of capitalism; we have to create movements that can offer everybody more than the fascists ever could.
\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. This is the way to take the offensive and move on to confronting the fundamental sources of oppression.
\n\nSome believe that life will go back to normal soon enough, and fascism and anti-fascism will once more be things of the past. But we fear that we have yet to see how far these conflicts will go, and that we have to invest ourselves in confronting them head on. The only way out is through. Double or nothing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/29/8.jpg\")
\nOn the night of August 22, following a turbulent week in which Trump’s sympathies with far-right and fascist groups became even clearer, Trump made an appearance in Phoenix, Arizona to rally his far-right base in a state already divided by ugly conflicts over race and immigration. In a classic move from the totalitarian playbook, Trump denied that the massive protests outside his speech existed at all, while heavily-armored riot police prepared to attack them with chemical weapons. Behind Trump stood a token black man who has appeared at several of his rallies, an inept attempt to distract from the ways that Trump is smoothing the way for racists like the one who murdered a demonstrator last week in Charlottesville. This report recounts the experiences of those outside Trump’s speech, facing down far-right violence and police attacks to open up a space for opposition.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/23/1.jpg\")
\nIf you live in Arizona, getting in your car and driving with your affinity group to Phoenix to protest white supremacy is something you do regularly. The potential costs of struggle have always been high for us. We have no illusions about the burden of prison time, what it can mean to be separated from family. The potential for violence from Neo-Nazis and the state is always a clear and present danger. This time however, it felt different.
\n\nRecently, many of us have been considering the possibility that we may not come home from the next anti-fascist action we attend. We spent our time preparing and having really hard conversations with our children, parents, and loved ones. This past year has been devastating. I feel honored to be out on the streets with comrades who are weighing the risks and still showing up.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/23/3.jpg\")
\nPuente organized the march—a grassroots migrant justice organization based in Phoenix, Arizona that focuses on education and empowerment within migrant communities to protect and defend families. They have been at the forefront of the struggle against the deputization of the police and against the racist enforcement policies of Joe Arpaio. Their years of tireless struggle were part of the reason that Arpaio didn’t get re-elected last time. That, and his bizarre mafioso-style feuds with other political opponents.
\n\nThousands turned out to protest in the 107 degree heat: a mixed and diverse crowd with lots of energy and many creative signs. People showed a lot of strength and dedication, considering that even after sunset, it was still 100 degrees. A shout out to those that arranged for bags of ice to be distributed—it kept the numbers of people treated for heat exhaustion and heat stroke to a relative few.
\n\nTrump rallying the far right against those who oppose fascism, while police with helmets and clubs wait outside to beat protesters.
\nWe were outnumbered by the Trump supporters; there were thousands of us, but there were well over 10,000 of them. Until the end of the night, scuffles between sides were isolated to sporadic incidents outside the convention center. It was a charged and unpleasant environment.
\n\nI witnessed a Trump supporter spit on a Latino youth, assault him, and attempt to carry out a “citizen’s arrest.” Other people pulled the young man up from the ground, and he kept at it into the night with his affinity group, a very sweet group of people. That Trump supporter felt he was well within his rights starting a street fight, spitting on a young kid, and putting him in a chokehold on the ground. He figured that if he “arrested” this kid, the police would be on his side. This highlights ties between the police, the military, and grassroots fascists. Thankfully, the kid got away, but it’s instructive that the Trump supporter felt so emboldened. Individually, many of the police are white supremacist sympathizers, and structurally, they are the armed wing of the state upholding white supremacy and democracy in all its genocidal glory.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/23/4.jpg\")
\nJust as in Charlottesville, the police came out to assist the right-wing and fascists. Police provided Trump supporters escort back to their vehicles. It was only after most Trump supporters had safely left the area that they deployed gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets in the areas with the highest concentration of protesters. There was some back and forth in the streets—protesters throwing back the canisters of poisonous gas they shot at us. The claims that our side deployed our own gas are laughable, utterly dishonest propaganda. I’ve never understood why the police get so upset when people throw gas canisters back at them. What the fuck do they expect?
\n\nA lot of people were gassed and hit with projectiles, and three people were arrested. Yet overall, the evening did not end as terribly as we had all been worried it would. Many people were not prepared to deal with chemical weapons or engage in street battle, but a lot of enthusiastic locals showed up and gave it their all—and that felt great! Step by step, we are building the capacity to face the violence of the police on a community-wide level.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/900211169734131713\n\n\n
The preponderance of arms on all sides felt disturbing and tactically inappropriate. I do not question the commitment to struggle when anarchists carry arms to a protest, but I would ask this: in Phoenix and Charlottesville, when your friends were engaged in physical altercations with white supremacists and police… what did you do? Did you stand on the sidelines with your guns and watch? I mean, thank you for not shooting anyone. I think a three-way gun battle is not something any of us are prepared for, nor do I think it would advance the struggles we are participating in. What does this militancy provide us from a practical perspective? Is it serving a tactical purpose, or is it empty posturing? We need more solidarity in the streets, we need to prepare for the fights ahead, and we need to be honest with ourselves about the very real potential outcomes of our actions. This question warrants further discussion, and I hope it will take place.
\n\nTrump is still considering a pardon for Joe Arpaio. As recently as this June, inmates were still being housed in Tent City outside when temperatures spiked to 110 degrees. I would like to call on Maricopa County to keep Tent City open with Joe Arpaio as its only occupant. When Trump pardons that racist sociopath, be sure to pack some liquid antacid (like unflavored Maalox) and water diluted 50/50 in a spray bottle, clean rags to wipe down with, disposable masks, and a camelback with water.
\n\nStay safe until then. We’ll see you in the streets.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/23/2.jpg\")
\nI am one of the thousands of people who confronted Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia last weekend. I am a blue-collar person, with a job, family, and responsibilities. I would have preferred to do other things with my weekend. However, I had to ask myself: If these people are allowed to run roughshod over this town, what will they do next?
\n\n\n\n\n“We would have been crushed like cockroaches if it were not for the anarchists and the antifascists… They saved our lives, actually. We would have been completely crushed, and I’ll never forget that.”
\n\n \n
No, I did not behave peacefully when I saw a thousand Nazis occupy a sizable American city. I fought them with the most persuasive instruments at hand, the way both my grandfathers did. I was maced, punched, kicked, and beaten with sticks, but I gave as good as I got, and usually better. Donald Trump says that “there was violence on both sides.” Of course there was. I might add that there were not murderers on both sides—but that’s not really my point.
\n\nI would like to ask a different question. What would have happened if there had not been violence on both sides? What would have happened if there had only been violence on one side?
\n\nOn the night of Friday, August 11, 2017, I saw something that I never thought I would see, and that I hope I never see again: 500 Nazis and white supremacists marching across the campus of the University of Virginia while police did nothing, surrounding 30 counter-demonstrators who were holding hands around a statue of Thomas Jefferson, and beating them with torches while calling them “nigger” and “boy.” By the end of the night, it was clear to me that the “Unite the Right” march had been organized for the express purpose of killing people on Saturday.
\n\nPermit me to quote a post from a clergyperson in Charlottesville at length, because it correctly explains what happened on Saturday morning, and why. There are countless other narratives like it online.
\n\n\n\n\n“A note on the Antifa:
\n\nThey are the reason Richard Spencer did not speak today. They are the reason the “Unite the Right” march didn’t happen. They strategically used violent tactics to incite the Nazis to violence, such that the governor declared a state of emergency before noon. Before the “Unite the Right” rally was scheduled to begin.
\n\nOne could argue this meant Nazis dissipated into the streets faster making it less safe, but let’s be real: Nazis have been making these streets less safe for a long time. They would have been out and about soon enough with or without the antifa.
\n\nI was with a group of clergy committed to non-violence today. We did our part. We bore witness to the pain and hatred in this city. We provided pastoral care/support as needed, especially during traumatic violent acts. This was our determined role going into today. Yes, some clergy risked injury and arrest to stop the Nazis. They formed a blockade at the entrance, but they were overpowered by the Nazis. The police did not view us as threatening enough to shut things down, because again, we were not there to threaten.
\n\nThe antifa strategically incited enough violence before noon to make the police declare it illegal to gather in Emancipation Park. Through this strategic violence they effectively made a previously legally permitted Nazi rally, illegal.
\n\nWe may not agree with each others tactics. We may have had different goals, but if you’re looking to praise people specifically for shutting down the “Unite the Right” rally, praise/thank the antifa. Not the clergy and not the police.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/17/2.jpg\")
The man who murdered Heather Heyer being taken into custody.
\nI do not want it to be soon forgotten that American anarchists and anti-fascists shut down the largest Nazi and white supremacist gathering on US soil in decades. We accomplished this despite being outnumbered, underequipped, and literally fighting up a hill—at great personal risk and at a terrible cost.
\n\nWhat if things had gone differently? What if we had done as the mayor recommended and stayed away from Emancipation Park, so as not to “feed into a cycle of violence”? What if the rally had proceeded as planned? What if Nazis and white supremacists had been able to build momentum into the night? Based on what I saw Friday and Saturday, there is no doubt in my mind what would have happened next: they would have terrorized the city of Charlottesville. They would have left their leadership a degree of plausible deniability, broken into smaller groups, and killed and injured any number of people in decentralized locations throughout the city. It was to be their Kristallnacht, their burning cross, their triumphant return.
\n\nInstead, they had to leave town in disarray in fear of us, the people of Charlottesville, and the police—in that order. They sent twenty people to the hospital and murdered Heather Heyer.
\n\nIt could have been much, much worse.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/17/1.jpg\")
Flowers where Heather Heyer was hit.
\nThese are dark and dangerous times. Nazis and white supremacists have shown that they are ready to kill and able to mobilize in great numbers, and they have the blessing of the President of the United States. They are well on their way to solidifying their position as the paramilitary arm of the Trump administration. These groups hope to be to Trump what ISIS is to Erdogan and what the Taliban is to the government of Pakistan: terrorist auxiliaries that provide strategic depth against enemies of the state.
\n\nOn the other hand, Nazis and white supremacists discredited themselves completely in the eyes of millions of American people this weekend, as did their President by emboldening and defending them. The names and faces of many of those who participated in the “Unite the Right” rally are being broadcast on twitter feeds such as “yes, you’re racist,” and more extensive doxxing is undoubtedly soon to come. It seems a stressful and rather lonely moment for our opposition.
\n\nOn the government side, Steve Bannon has lost his job, but he is back at his old post at Breitbart, preparing to catalyze another wave of grassroots nationalism. As always, Trump is either on the ropes or on the verge of pulling off an authoritarian coup. It is time for Americans of good conscience to resume the offensive, before this match made in hell has time to regain its footing and to consolidate further.
\n\nDonald Trump was elected head of state through the democratic process, of course, as was Adolf Hitler. He has the support of millions of people; so did Adolf Hitler. His government is in bed with people who dream about carrying out a second Holocaust and reinstating slavery, among other things. We have every right to topple this government if we can. It would be unfortunate to look back on this moment with regret, realizing that we missed our chance.
\n\nIn my opinion, the high-water mark thus far of resistance to the Trump regime was the wave of airport occupations at the end of January, which set in motion a course of events that ultimately led to Steve Bannon being iced out of the foreign policy sphere by the few remaining adults in Trump’s circle. Unfortunately, they left Bannon the domestic sphere as his playpen, and the Deep State doesn’t care very much. No one is coming to save us.
\n\nWhat would it take to rise to this occasion? We would have to mobilize large crowds nationwide to shut down government infrastructure, prioritizing everything nearest and dearest to Bannon and his faction. Something like that might work. I don’t think it’s too late.
\n\nOf course, after Charlottesville, all such crowds will be considered soft targets by fascist murderers. We will have to demonstrate that we are able to exert deadly force to deter such attacks, as Redneck Revolt did admirably in Charlottesville.
\n\nIf Americans of good conscience push hard enough, we may be able to force Trump to abandon Bannon and Bannonism. We might be able to topple Trump entirely. But under no circumstances will anyone with any self-respect ever submit to governance by Nazis. This government and its fascist allies should think carefully before they choose their next move.
\n\nIn the spirit of Robert Grodt, who fought fascism in Raqqa, and in the spirit of Heather Heyer, who fought fascism in her own hometown—
\n\nAn anarchist
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/08/12/solidarity-with-charlottesville-a-guide-to-solidarity-demonstrations-around-the-world", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/08/12/solidarity-with-charlottesville-a-guide-to-solidarity-demonstrations-around-the-world", "title": "Solidarity with Charlottesville : A Guide to Solidarity Demonstrations around the World", "summary": "In response to the fascist murder in Charlottesville, we offer a list of solidarity demonstrations and a PDF of a flier you can print and distribute to inform others about this situation.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/12/solidarity-rallies/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/12/solidarity-rallies/header.jpg", "date_published": "2017-08-12T22:20:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:34Z", "tags": [ "Charlottesville", "fascism", "solidarity actions", "antifascism", "antifa" ], "content_html": "On August 12, a fascist murdered one person and injured dozens more by driving a vehicle into a crowd of anti-racist protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia. Fascists had been calling for violence in advance; they made it very clear that this would happen. We are calling for solidarity actions to take place around the country in response—to support the bereaved, to encourage those who courageously stood up to fascist murderers, to reach out to our communities about this situation, and to show that we will not stand for this. Here, you can find a list of solidarity demonstrations and a PDF of a flier you can print and distribute to inform others about this situation.
\n\nWe are updating this page continuously.
\n\nPlease send updates about solidarity demonstrations to us via @crimethinc or rollingthunder@crimethinc.com.
\n\nAtlanta, GA: Hyatt Regency, Downtown Atlanta, 6:45 PM.
\nBaltimore, MD: Penn-North Metro Station, 8 PM. More event info →
\nBuffalo, NY: Lafayette Square, 8 PM. More event info →
\nChicago, IL: Trump Tower, 7 PM. More event info →
\nCleveland Heights, OH: Peace Park, Coventry Rd, 9 PM.
\nColumbia, SC: 1100 Gervais St, 8:30 PM. More event info →
\nEl Cajon, CA: 701 Broadway, 8 PM. More event info →
\nHarrisonburg, VA: Court Sq, 7 PM. More event info →
\nHillsboro, OR: 150 Main Street, Hillsboro Civic Center, 3:30 PM. More event info →
\nIowa City, IA: 21 North Clinton St, 5 PM. More event info →
\nKalamazoo, MI: Bronson Park, 2:30 PM. More event info →
\nLondon, UK: Trafalgar Square, 12 PM.
\nLos Angeles, CA: LAPD Headquarters, 7 PM. More event info →
\nOlympia, WA: Percival Landing Park, 7 PM. More event info →
\nNew Orleans, LA: Lee Circle, 7 PM. More event info →
\nNew York, NY: Union Square, 5 PM. More event info →
\nOakland, CA: Oscar Grant Plaza, 14th and Broadway, 7 PM. More event info → Facebook
\nPhiladelphia, PA: Downtown, happening now. More event info →
\nPortland, OR: Pioneer Courthouse, 5 PM. More event info →
\nSanta Ana, CA: Ross and Santa Ana Blvd, 6:30 PM. More event info →
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Toasterhase/status/896503835266613248\n \n
Alexandria, VA: Old Town Farmers’ Market, 6PM. More event info →
\nAsheville, NC: In front of Vance Monument, 7 PM.
\nAtlanta, GA: Woodruff Park, 7 PM. More event info →
\nBaton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State Capitol, 7 PM. More event info →
\nBirmingham, AL: Five Points South Fountain, 6:30 PM. More event info →
\nBlacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech, Henderson Lawn, 2 PM. More event info →
\nBloomington, IN: Monroe County Courthouse, 7 PM. More event info →
\nBordeaux, France: Consulat des Etats Unis d’Amérique, 7 PM.
\nBremerton, WA: Evergreen Park, 7 PM. More event info →
\nBridgeport, CT: McLevy Green, 6 PM. More event info →
\nChapel Hill, NC: Silent Sam Statue, 7 PM. More event info →
\nChicago, IL: Millennium Park, 6 PM. More event info →
\nChico, CA: MLK and 20th Street, 9 AM. More event info →
\nCincinnati, OH: Cincinnati City Hall, 5 PM. More event info →
\nColumbus, OH: Columbus State House, 8 PM. More event info →
\nConcord, NC: Rotary Square & Market, 111 Union St S, 7 PM. More event info →
\nCrescent City, CA: S. Curve, 1:00 PM. More event info →
\nDanbury, CT: Danbury Library, 6 PM. More event info →
\nDenver, CO: City Park, 2 PM. More event info →
\nDetroit, MI: Philip A. Hart Plaza, 5 PM. More event info →
\nFayettesville, NC: 215 Myrover St, 6 PM. More event info →
\nFort Collins, CO: Oak Street Plaza at 2 PM.
\nFredericksburg VA: Hurkamp Park, 8:30 PM.
\nGallup, NM: Safeway, W. Jefferson ave. and Highway 491, 12 PM. More event info →
\nGeneva, NY: Bicentennial Park, Exchange St and Lake St, 6 PM.
\nGrand Rapids, MI: Rosa Parks Circle, Grand Rapids, 5 PM. More event info →
\nGreensboro, NC: Greensboro Governmental Plaza, 7 PM. More event info →
\nHarrisonburg, VA: Court Sq, 7 PM. More event info →
\nHouston, TX: Houston City Hall, 7 PM. More event info →
\nKalamazoo, MI: Bronson Park, 2:30 PM. More event info →
\nLancaster, PA: Penn Square, 6 PM. More event info →
\nLansing, MI: Michigan State Capitol, 110 N Capitol Ave, 6 PM. More event info →
\nLondon, England: Trafalgar Square 12 PM. More event info →
\nLouisville, KY: 3208 W. Broadway, 3 PM. More event info →
\nMadison, WI: Wisconsin State Capitol, 8 PM. More event info →
\nMiddletown, CT: South Green (old Church St.), 6 PM. More event info →
\nMissoula, MO: The XXXX’s to Higgins St. Bridge, 6 PM. More event info →
\nMontreal, QC: Phillips Square, 7 PM. More event info →
\nMorgantown, WV: WVU Mountainlair Student Union, 1550 University Ave, 8 PM.
\nMunich, Germany: Marienplatz, 7:30 PM. More event info →
\nNew Haven, CT: Church St and Chapel St, 6 PM. More event info →
\nNew York City, NY: Union Square, 4 PM. More event info →
\nOrlando, FL: Lake Eola Park, 8 PM. More event info →
\nOttawa, ON: Canadian Tribute to Human Rights, 7 PM. More event info →
\nParis, France: Place de la Nation, 7 PM.
\nPhoenix, AZ: Phillips Memorial Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, 4 PM. More event info →
\nPittsburgh, PA: Schenley Plaza, 4100 Forbes Ave, 7 PM. More event info →
\nRaleigh, NC: CCB Plaza, 201 N Corcoran St, 6 PM. More event info →
\nRussellville, AR: Courthouse, 4:30 PM.
\nSacramento, CA: City Hall 7:30 PM. More event info →
\nSacramento, CA: 1315 10th Street, 7 PM.
\nSan Francisco, CA: 24th and Mission, 2 PM. More event info →
\nSan Francisco, CA: City Hall, 7 PM. More event info →
\nSanta Barbara, CA: SB Museum of Art on State Street and Anapamu. 5 PM.
\nSanta Cruz, CA: The Clock Tower at N. Pacific and Water St, 7 PM. More event info →
\nSanta Rosa, CA: Courthouse Square, 4 PM.
\nSeattle, WA: 100 Dexter Ave N, 1 PM. More event info →
\nSyracuse, NY: Clinton Square, 2 S Clinton Sq, 5 PM. [More event info →]https://facebook.com/events/160817107820223)
\nTacoma, WA: Tacoma Chinese Reconciliation Park, 1741 N Schuster Pkwy, 7:30 PM. More event info →
\nTampa, FL: Hillsborough County Clerk’s Office, 7 PM. More event info →
\nToronto, ON: US Consulate Toronto 360 University Avenue, 7 PM. More event info →
\nTucson, AZ: Hotel Congress, 311 E Congress St, 4:30 PM. More event info →
\nWashington, DC: Old Town Farmers’ Market, Alexandria, VA 6 PM. More event info →
\nWest Hartford, CT: Farmington and Main St, 12 PM. More event info →
\nWest Palm Beach, FL: West Palm Beach Waterfront Park, 100 Clematis St, 8 PM. More event info →
\nWillimantic, CT: Jilson Square Park, 4 PM. More event info →
\nWorcester, MA City Hall, 6PM. More event info →
\nSouth Bend, IN: Jon Hunt Memorial Plaza, 7 PM.
\nWaynesville, NC: Haywood County Courthouse, 5 PM. More event info →
\nBaiona, Iparralde: Town Hall, 6:30 PM.
\nBilbao, Basque Country: Elkarretaratzea, Plaza Arriaga, 1 PM. More event info →
\nFort Myers, FL: Centennial Park, 5 PM. More event info →
\nUppsala, Sweden: Olof Palme Place, 6 PM.
\nAlbuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Bookstore, 6PM. More event info →
\nColorado Springs, CO: Colorado Springs City Hall, 4 PM. More event info →
\nFind more Stand in Solidarity with Charlottesville at Indivisible.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/12/solidarity-rallies/charlottesville-fascists-are-murdering-us-now.jpg\")
\nOn August 12, an alt-right fascist murdered a person and injured dozens more by driving a vehicle into a crowd of anti-racist protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia. We are calling for solidarity actions to take place around the country to respond to this.
\n\nIf we allow the alt-right and neo-Nazis to organize in our communities, the consequences will be fatal. Charlottesville is just the beginning. If the alt-right can get away with murder there, none of us will be safe. We have to stand up to white supremacists, we have to shut down and chase out these bigots every time they try to organize, or else they will kill more people.
\n\nYou are a target. These bigots target people of color, women, Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ people, immigrants, radicals, liberals, and anyone who doesn’t agree with them—not just with words, but with violence. Emboldened by Trump’s election, alt-right and fascist bigots have already shot and wounded protestors against racism in Minneapolis and Seattle, stabbed bystanders to death in Portland for intervening against Islamophobia, and sowed hatred and discord across the country. We are betraying our friends and neighbors if we don’t take a stand.
\n\nThe police will not protect us. They murder over a thousand people every year in this country, and infiltrate and attack our demonstrations when we stand up against alt-right terror. We have to organize to defend ourselves.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/12/solidarity-rallies/nyc.jpg\")
New York City, New York
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/12/solidarity-rallies/bay-area.jpg\")
Bay Area, California
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/12/solidarity-rallies/chicago.jpg\")
Chicago, Illinois
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/12/solidarity-rallies/sf.jpg\")
San Francisco, California
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/12/solidarity-rallies/asheville.jpg\")
Asheville, North Carolina
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/12/solidarity-rallies/bure.jpg\")
Bure
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/12/solidarity-rallies/alexandria.jpg\")
Alexandria, Virginia
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/12/solidarity-rallies/copenhagen.jpg\")
Copenhagen, Denmark
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/12/solidarity-rallies/helsinki.jpeg\")
Helsinki, Finland
\nOn Friday, August 11, a wide range of far-right groups from around the US gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia for a march the night before their “Unite the Right” rally. Hundreds of them carrying lit torches paraded across the town with very little visible police presence. The streets were largely empty, thanks to a request from Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe. When the march arrived at the foot of the statue of Thomas Jefferson ringed by a few dozen counterprotesters, the men with torches surrounded it and attacked them.
\n\nFascists attacking counterdemonstrators in Charlottesville. This is what they will do to you, too, unless we stop them together.
\nUntil now, some of the participants have been coy about their politics. Now that they have all joined in explicitly fascist chants like “blood and soil” while many of them raised their arms in the Nazi salute, it is clear that all of them—the so-called Alt Right, the Proud Boys, and all the militiamen and Oathkeepers and basement-dwelling trolls who keep them company—are openly endorsing fascism. They aim to create a situation in which they can terrorize and murder with impunity in order to create an even more white supremacist, even more totalitarian state.
\n\nWith this march in Charlottesville, the far right has crossed a threshold. Until now, they appeared to be a motley array of online groups, most of which lacked the courage to identify unironically with fascism. Today, they have arrived as a social movement that can pull together hundreds of people to carry out organized acts of violence while the police look on. They hope to weaponize the ignorance and insecurity of the precarious white working class to trick poor white people into serving once again as cannon fodder for their own oppressors.
\n\nBut it’s not too late—not yet, anyway. The fascists are coming to prominence before they have the numbers or legitimacy in the public eye that they need to defend their new position. If we act swiftly and decisively—giving them neither legitimacy nor quarter—there is still time to stop them before they move the clock from 2017 to 1933.
\n\nRemember last November, when Donald Trump was elected and it seemed like the entire US was about to veer into a far-right dictatorship? While liberals were immobilized by shock, anarchists immediately went on the offensive in order to destabilize the Trump regime before everyone got accustomed to a new level of tyranny. We recognized that the far right had come to power too early, before they could build a broad consensus in favor of their agenda, and that this put them in a vulnerable position. By acting decisively against the inauguration and the Muslim ban, we helped to show that there could be no business or politics as usual under Trump, and this created fractures within the halls of power.
\n\nIf not for these immediate, massive expressions of defiance, judges might not have dared to block the Muslim ban, or White House employees to leak information. Imagine the US right now if Trump were ruling with the full apparatus of the state united behind him! Instead, today, the US government seems more dysfunctional than ever. That may explain why Trump is threatening war to shore up his position, while fascists are no longer counting on his government to carry out their agenda under cover of normalcy.
\n\nNow we have to use the same strategy to forestall the threat of a new widespread fascist movement in the US. We have to respond immediately, cutting its oxygen supply and blocking its growth. But how do we do that?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/08/12/1.jpg\")
The aspiring shock troops of a new barefaced totalitarianism.
\nFirst, we can’t accord fascists any legitimacy. One network described them as “white activists” last night. Such euphemisms are inappropriate for people giving the Nazi salute. It must be clear to everyone that they are not attempting to participate in a dialogue, but rather seeking to start a war.
\n\nBy the same token, we must not look to the police or any other aspect of the state for deliverance. The complicity of the police in supporting one fascist undertaking after another is well-established by now. Besides, anything the state does against the far right, we can be sure it will do to us twice as hard. It would be a mistake to give anyone the impression that state intervention could solve this problem without creating even bigger problems. If history is any guide, whatever power the state is accorded will eventually end up in the hands of fascists.
\n\nWe also can’t defer to authorities like Governor McAuliffe when they tell us to respond to the situation by hiding indoors. In effect, this means ceding the streets to the fascists, in which to do whatever they want to whomever is still out there. Recommending this strategy makes Governor McAuliffe complicit in the rise of fascism. Sticking our heads in the sand will not make this situation go away.
\n\nLikewise, it won’t help to gather in churches, as some did in Charlottesville last night, congratulating ourselves on how nonviolent we are while fascists patrol the streets. Last night, when the church locked its doors, many were trapped outside, dramatically outnumbered. This kind of behavior is also complicity.
\n\nIt’s essential to build fighting formations capable of facing down far-right violence. Fascists love to portray themselves as victims in order to claim the right to do violence to others; their entire narrative is built around the contradiction that they are simultaneously master race and underdog, victorious and persecuted. They treat any resistance to their program as an affront to their dignity and a violation of their safe space. Nonetheless, we have to be able to stop them in their streets, because they are in the business of purveying revenge fantasies. Any footage they can record of successful attacks, however cowardly, will help them recruit from their base of bullies and sadists. Because of this, it is preferable not to enter into conflict with them except when fully prepared—but at all costs, we must not let them attain control of the streets.
\n\nMost of this is not a matter of physical confrontation. We need people to put up posters; we need people to hand out handbills, and form local organizations, and coordinate neighborhood response teams. We need to organize legal support for those arrested fighting fascists and institutions like the US border that are already accomplishing their stated goals. We need people to infiltrate their groups; we need to set up fake online accounts with which to monitor them or spread disinformation and strife. We need to identify the fault lines along which their alliances can be split, and open gulfs between them and the rest of the right wing. One can do a great deal to fight fascism without ever entering a gym.
\n\nAs in our efforts against the Trump administration, we can’t take on fascism alone. We have to make sure that we are part of a much broader movement, yet that our efforts are not diluted or reduced to some lowest common denominator.
\n\nAbove all, we have to popularize another set of values, so that the cheap victim narratives and fantasies of authority that fascists offer can gain no traction among the general public. We have to show how fulfilling it is to treat each other as equals, rather than serving simultaneously as a peon and a petty tyrant in a chain of command. We have to distinguish true self-determination from supposed self-determination for “nations” or “peoples,” which always boils down to being bossed around by someone of your own ethnicity or religion. We have to foster a sense of self-worth that is not based in membership in invented categories, but in our personal relationships and values and accomplishments.
\n\nIn the growing popularity of fascism, we can see the failure of guilt-based liberal anti-racism and anti-sexism. Mere privilege politics have failed us; we have to show what everyone stands to gain from the abolition of whiteness and patriarchy, and to present this as a positive program rather than as nothing more than the elimination of unfair advantages. However unfair an advantage is, someone is bound to want to keep it—we have to convey that there’s nothing whiteness or male domination can offer that is worth having in the first place, compared to the genuine intimacy and care that are possible when we approach each other as equals, without borders or abstract criteria of belonging.
\n\nThis is the opposite of pandering to the supposed ignorance or self-interest of “the white working class,” as if that were a single entity. On the contrary, it means appealing to what is wisest and most honorable in all people.
\n\nAnarchism is one of the most thoroughgoing forms of opposition to fascism, in that it entails opposition to hierarchy itself. Virtually every framework that countenances hierarchy, be it democracy or “national liberation,” enables old power imbalances like white supremacy and patriarchy to remain in place, hidden within the legitimacy of the prevailing structures. Under democracy, white supremacy has not disappeared; it has just disguised itself. If we want to be done with fascism once and for all, we have to cut to the root of things.
\n\nIn that regard, we can see the struggle ahead of us as an opportunity to challenge everything about our society and ourselves, not just the violence of a radical fringe group. As society polarizes and things escalate, we should not simply be drawn into a violent grudge match with our opposite numbers on the far right, but look for escape hatches through which all humanity might escape from this long nightmare.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/xshularx/status/896200110945730560\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/06/06/confronting-the-nationalists-and-their-police-a-full-report-from-portland-on-june-4", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/06/06/confronting-the-nationalists-and-their-police-a-full-report-from-portland-on-june-4", "title": "Confronting the Nationalists and Their Police : A Full Report from Portland on June 4", "summary": "In response to a rally called to promote violent nationalism in the wake of two racist murders, antifascists converged in Portland despite a massive police operation. A full on-the-ground report.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/06/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/06/header.jpg", "date_published": "2017-06-06T08:41:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:34Z", "tags": [ "Portland", "fascism", "antifascism", "antifa" ], "content_html": "
On June 4, shortly after Jeremy Christian murdered two people who intervened when he was harassing two teenage women of color on a Portland commuter train, nationalists organized a rally in downtown Portland, inviting “patriots” such as Kyle Chapman to come speak in favor of carrying out violent attacks on anti-fascists and others. In response, anarchists and other opponents of fascism converged in downtown Portland, despite a massive police operation to reserve the space for nationalists. In this account, one participant offers a full report on the day’s events.
\n\nMy crew and I were nervous going into the protest against the nationalist “Patriot Prayer” rally in Portland on June 4. We had talked in advance about what could happen; the conversation was a little bleaker than our usual planning discussions. The mainstream media has been reporting nonstop on the killing of two people and slashing of a third who stood up to defend two young women of color from white supremacist Jeremy Christian’s hostility on the commuter train a week ago, and we were all feeling the tension. “Something sketchy is going to happen” was more or less what we concluded. At the minimum, we were expecting a Berkeley-style street brawl between antifascists and alt-right LARPing patriots in gladiator costumes; at the worst, we figured some delusional, Kyle-Chapman-loving, “antifa are the real fascists” white nationalist would throw a grenade and we would lose some comrades. In the end, we decided that any risk we envisioned was outweighed by our desire not to let the nationalists organize openly, as that would embolden more racists to go out and harass, attack, and murder people of color. We prepared for the worst.
\n\nWhen we arrived on the scene, we saw that others had come prepared as well. The black bloc was prepared. The police were prepared. The nationalists were prepared. We passed the smaller labor rally and the timid “no masks allowed” liberal rally on the blocks surrounding the fascists; then we made our war around the lines and lines of police protecting the patriots. We felt a bit safer when we saw that the largest of the four concurrent demonstrations was the one comprised of militant antifascists. It’s hard to gauge the exact number because the participants were spread out around a park the size of a city block, but I think it is safe to say the total was around 1000.
\n\nAt protests in the northwest over the past few months, police have sought to confiscate anything that could be interpreted as a weapon, essentially disarming protesters early on before anybody gets a chance to make use of them. In Seattle on January 20, the day an antifascist was shot, the Seattle PD kettled the anarchist march after only a block of marching, took all the flags, shields, and sticks, and let everyone go. In Portland, the police were taking people’s flags, flagpoles, baseball bats, shields, and anything else they could identify from the edge of the park as protesters entered. A number of people managed to slip through with shields. Plenty of people in the black bloc, and four out of the five people I came with, were wearing helmets and other protective gear. A few friends were wearing Kevlar vests under their hoodies in order not to be the next antifascist shot by a trigger-happy patriot. Based on pictures the police released later, people also managed to carry in a small arsenal of knives, brass knuckles, pepper spray, chains, flares, telescopic batons, smoke bombs, fireworks, slingshots, crowbars, and, of course, cases of Pepsi.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/06/7.jpg\")
“Their identification with those in power is always a kind of cosplay: they can only be a pathetic imitation of the tyrants they look up to. They ape the Spartans, the Romans, the Nazis, who themselves were pathetic imitations of an idealized image of manhood, mere cogs in a military machine.”
\nAbout 50 well-armed cops acted as a buffer between the antifascists and the fascists, with a few more scattered around the edges of the park and a few hundred more at the ready. Behind them, Three Percenters and stick-waving, armor-wearing gladiators formed another line, and behind them, flag-waving, Trump-loving white people who just wanted to listen to alt-right B-list celebrities like Kyle Chapman proclaim things like “Open season on antifa. Smash on sight!” There were a few hundred nationalists. I’d be shocked if anyone put the number higher than 300.
\n\nI imagine the police were under a lot of pressure to prevent brawls between MAGA goons and antifascists, and they were mostly successful. With all the media hype, the mayor calling for the federal government to cancel the permits and then rescinding his request, and the wave of escalating antigovernment protests in Portland, their main strategy was to keep all the demonstrations separate. There was certainly no safe way to cross the street as a group or to engage meaningfully with the nationalists. The few alt-right provocateurs who made it into the park with the antifascists were quickly chased out. The sketchy photographers who were walking around trying to get close-ups of people’s faces were run off as well.
\n\nDemonstrators gently expel a “proud boy” nationalist from the antifascist area.
\nA lifted pickup driving by got stuck in traffic. Some mischievous individuals confiscated its American flag and “blue lives matter” flags; it was pelted with water bottles and sticks. People brought the “blue lives matter” flag to the front and burned it a few feet from the line of riot cops. One confused Proud Boy in his early 20s was discovered wandering around the park, identifiable by a shirt reading “Proud Boy.” I’m not sure if he was trying to be brave or if he was just lost, but he was surrounded by about 40 black-clad antifascists. This kid could easily have been seriously injured, and several comrades were on the verge of letting him have it. As he was contemplating his final moments, trying not to release the contents of his bladder and surely regretting his poor sense of direction, he was told, “You ought to leave.” And he did. Quickly.
\n\nFor three and a half hours, pretty much nothing happened. Every once in a while, someone would get chased off and people would rush over to see what was going on. A few times, some eager young’un with a bullhorn tried to rally people to mass up in one corner of the park in order to somehow march through the line of riot cops and disrupt the fascists. While I appreciate this kind of optimism, the probability of success seemed considerably smaller than the probability of getting beat up by a hundred well-prepared cops. There was some stagnation. And the tension was still there.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/06/5.jpg\")
Police preserving a space for advocates of nationalist violence to recruit.
\nThen, seemingly out of nowhere, the cops attacked the antifascist rally—without any kind of direct provocation.
\n\nNow, I’m not much of a fan of the “we were attacked by the cops for no reason, I swear!” line. I don’t really think it serves us as anarchists to appeal to the moral outrage of liberals who already hate us. It doesn’t make us feel better about getting attacked—and it certainly doesn’t make it enticing to anyone to join a group that is constantly getting attacked by cops “for no reason.”
\n\nThey didn’t attack us for no reason, though. They have a hundred good reasons to attack us. As anarchists who are fighting against the rise of fascism, who are on the news for disrupting white nationalist events all around the country, who burn limousines and punch Nazis during important transitions of government power, who fight cops and break windows and march without permits, who advocate the dismantling of government and police and prisons, who have no respect for authority, who want to abolish hierarchy, whose ideas and tactics are gaining traction among a growing population of people who are feeling angry and need an outlet to vent their dissatisfaction and disillusionment… there are plenty of reasons police would choose to attack us.
\n\nTheir official line was that unidentified people in black were collecting bricks from the top of a park bathroom, so they moved in to prevent the throwing of bricks. Conveniently, they timed their attack on the antifascist rally to take place half an hour before the nationalist rally was set to end. The park in which the nationalists were gathering was surrounded on all sides by counterdemonstrators. Presumably the police concluded that the only way to prevent roving street brawls was to push back the most militant opposition, opening space for the patriots to disperse safely.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/06/4.jpg\")
Police firing “less lethal” munitions at demonstrators.
\nThe police came in firing pepper balls, rubber bullets, tear gas, concussion bombs, pepper spray, and something they referred to as “aerial distraction devices,” all to the delight of the equally surprised fascists they were protecting. Demonstrators responded with rocks, sticks, water bottles, bricks, full Pepsi cans, and anything else that could be thrown. As people pelted the cops in riot gear making their way into the park, unarmored bike cops stood in the street to the side of the mêlée. It can be difficult to make split-second decisions in such circumstances, but on reflection, the bike cops were probably more vulnerable than the cops clad head to toe in expensive body armor.
\n\nA crew of well-prepared folks in black bloc were able to hold out a little longer, but most people were almost immediately pushed back by the gas, and medics were on the scene immediately treating people with eye flushes and treating various injuries. One medic I talked to treated someone who caught a brick to the cheek, presumably from friendly fire (aim better next time, comrades!). After a few rounds of less-lethal weaponry and police charges, the park was cleared and the bloc started reforming about a hundred yards back, across the street in the next section of the same park. Chants of “Walk! Don’t run!” kept the atmosphere oddly calm and dissuaded a lot of people from panicking. By this point, about half of the participants had dispersed.
\n\nThe nationalist rally was now a full block away with a ton of aggressive cops blocking access to it. A barricade of construction signs and newspaper boxes appeared in the street to prevent any further police advance. As people mingled, a few in black started calling for people to regroup in bloc and march. About a hundred or so people took off chanting down the street, while the rest stayed in the park or at the barricade. The march made it about two blocks, but was outmaneuvered and turned back by riot cops who were riding around holding on to the exterior of customized personnel-carrying SUVs.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/06/9.jpg\")
Antifascists marching through Portland on June 4.
\nThe march swung back by the park and almost everybody else joined in, swelling the numbers to somewhere between 300 and 500. It seemed like something might have been possible, but I could sense the hesitation of the group I was rolling with. The march made it another block, then was again outflanked by the police on the SUVs and we had to make another turn. After another block, we were turned away yet again by a different group of cops. I could see more cop SUVs loaded down with riot cops zooming ahead from the side streets.
\n\nThe city isn’t made of cobblestones, there weren’t any nearby construction sites, just about everything was bolted down, and almost all the flags and many of the shields had been confiscated a few hours earlier. It felt like we were being corralled. With limited means to engage, my buddy and I decided to disengage, so we made our way up a side street to de-bloc. At the time, we had mixed feelings about leaving; the size and anger of the crowd suggested that it might have some potential. Unfortunately, it turned out that our instincts were right. The march only progressed a couple more blocks before being kettled, trapping about 200 people on a city block without escape routes.
\n\nWhen people realized they were trapped, a giant pile of black clothing, helmets, knives, rocks, and other weapons materialized and a group of sweaty, plaid wearing Portlanders meandered about, waiting to find out what would happen. A few people managed to ascend a high wall to escape into a parking garage before the police caught on and started blasting them with pepper balls, shooting over the heads of a few disapproving bystanders. The cops began slowly processing people, letting them go after photographing their IDs. As this was taking place, the nationalist demonstration was ending and the participants were dispersing right in front of the family-friendly liberal rally.
\n\nAltogether, there were 14 arrests, and around 200 people were IDed from the antifascist march. The day didn’t feel like a defeat, but it didn’t feel like a success either. A lot of people came together to fight back against the police, but with limited resources and effectiveness. The alt-right rally was completely surrounded by people who opposed them, but it was largely unaffected by the counterdemonstrations. The police were most effective when they were acting as a buffer between the demonstrations and when they were corralling the marches. On at least two occasions, Three Percenters actively aided the police in arresting antifascists. The antifascist contingent was most effective and felt the most inspiring when we were able to maintain a space free of police, however briefly.
\n\nAt the end of any major confrontation, my comrades and I ask ourselves questions and discuss what could have gone better. Could we have held space longer even under assault from heavily-armed police? Were there other ways to disrupt the nationalist rally? How can we fight in a sterilized and controlled cityscape? What would have helped us prevent the kettle? Could we have been more prepared? Helmets felt essential, and sturdy flagpoles would have been nice—but what could have transformed the fight to something that felt winnable? More shields to protect against police projectiles? Hammers to break up material? Smoke bombs? What lessons can we draw as we move forward? I hope to hear conversations like these happening as people strategize about what we can do, individually and collectively, to be smarter, fiercer, and more effective the next time we engage.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/06/2.jpg\")
A smashed police vehicle in Portland on May Day, 2017. The events of June 4 put such actions in context.
\nIn May, Jeremy Christian, an alt-right proponent of so-called “free speech,” murdered two people on a commuter train in Portland who were responding to his attacks on two teenage women of color. In response, far-right organizers promoted a rally in favor of “free speech” to take place in downtown Portland on June 4. Portland Police, Oregon State Police, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and a host of other state forces mobilized to protect these “patriots” from the consequences of promoting hatred and violence. In response, we have prepared a poster articulating how police and fascists work together to hasten the rise of totalitarianism. Please print these out and deploy them everywhere.
\n\nPoster: “The Two Faces of Fascism” color pdf
\n\nPoster: “The Two Faces of Fascism” black-and-white pdf
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/05/1.jpg\")
\nThe events in Portland reflect a classic model we have already seen police and fascists employ in Berkeley. Police disarm and disempower demonstrators so fascists can attack them with impunity. In the aftermath of the clashes that took place in Berkeley on April 15, police carried out a series of raids in the Bay Area utilizing intelligence that had been provided to them by far-right internet trolls. This two-pronged assault enables reactionaries embedded in the state to disavow the elements of their agenda that are perceived as too extreme, while utilizing a variety of tactics to crush attempts at self-determination and self-defense.
\n\nIn creating a space for nationalists to promote violence and seizing weapons from those who need to be able to defend themselves from attacks like the one carried out by Jeremy Christian, Portland police are complicit in the rise of fascism. On June 4, police attacked demonstrators bearing banners reading MOURN THE DEAD and FIGHT LIKE HELL FOR THE LIVING. They utilized a variety of less-lethal weaponry to break up demonstrations against the far-right organizers, in order to preserve a space for the far right to continue recruiting.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/06/10.jpg\")
\nFascists and other nationalists support the police, in turn, by spreading narratives justifying their violence against those opposing the rise of fascism. Anyone who has experience in demonstrations knows that police manufacture their own propaganda to justify whatever they do. Yet reactionaries who consider CNN and the New York Times “fake news” are willing to believe anything they read on a police twitter account. This is the mindset that supports fascism: independent reporting and critical inquiry are derided, while the narratives spread by the authorities are swallowed whole.
\n\nAll this is part of a broader pattern in which police and fascists reinforce each other’s activities. Here’s how it works, in a nutshell. Fascist groups promote racist, sexist, and nationalist violence. Individual bigots carry it out—attacking people in the streets, shooting people in churches, stabbing people on trains. The authorities use these attacks as an excuse to increase control, promising to protect a fearful population. But the greatest threat is not individual fascists: it is the state itself. It is the state that deports and imprisons millions, that suppresses dissent, that imposes the tremendous imbalances of power that characterize this society.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/06/8.jpg\")
The state stands on a foundation of violence; fascism is never far away.
\nIf we count on the authorities to control fascist activity, granting them resources and legitimacy in hopes that they will protect us, it is only a matter of time until a more reactionary government takes power and uses those resources and legitimacy to carry out even more violence.
\n\nThis is why only grassroots resistance can stop the rise of fascism. We salute the courage of those who took the streets in Portland to oppose racist violence and the rise of fascism. In the end, if we want to put an end to all racist violence, we will have to come to grips with the state itself. We have to become capable of defending our demonstrations and communities from police as well as fascists.
\n\nDemonstrators chant “all cops are bastards” in Portland on June 4 after police attack them.
\nWe are pleased to present a video from Slovenian anti-fascists, “Antifa Sisters.” The struggle against fascism and nationalism has taken many forms throughout different lands and times, all of which we should draw on as we face a new wave of far-right momentum in the United States. As we analyze the spread of fascism and mobilize to shut down fascist recruiting, it’s important to keep our efforts joyous and fun. Organizing against fascist initiatives should embrace the full range of tactics, offering a multitude of roles for every person to choose from and encompassing every aspect of life. We may have to defeat fascists in open confrontation, but we defeat fascism itself by refusing to suppress everything in ourselves that is extraordinary and exuberant, refusing to become the glum warriors of some grudge match, remaining focused on our romantic long-term project of changing the world.
\n\nAntifa Sisters is an initiative of unnamed heroines determined to bash back! against the spread of nationalism and fascism. Sometimes they appear in the middle of the night; other times, they run through the streets in plain sight. Antifa Sisters first emerged in response to Neo-Nazi attacks on autonomous spaces in Slovenia in February 2016. Since then, they have used their graffometer to measure right-wing contamination on the streets of Slovenian cities and villages, removed hateful messages from the walls, and trained to defend the projects they hold dear, while preparing to dance on the ruins of the ruling order.
\n\nThey stand alongside everyone who wants to live in cities where no one is afraid to walk alone at night, where the slogans on people’s lips are not messages of hate but songs of resistance and courage. They are everyone who refuses to back down in the face of fascist threats, everyone who struggles for a freer world. They are all of us, refusing to give in.
\n\nWho you gonna call? Antifa Sisters!
\n\nKomunal is a site producing media from within social struggles in Slovenia and providing space for others to share alternative and movement-based communications. We are not journalists, nor do we aspire to be; we are activists who enjoy playing with media tools.
\n\nOur platform is an attempt to provide access to issues, events, and perspectives ignored by other venues. We see our production as a form of research into invisible and misunderstood social conditions. In this capacity, media plays a critical role in opening up conflicts by exposing social contradictions and political and economic injustice. Media is one way we engage in social debate. We write, film, take pictures, make audio recordings, and use cyberspace toward these ends. In our collaborations, we aim to develop a common analysis and to communalize our labor. To contribute and cooperate, email info[at]komunal.org.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/04/20/the-state-of-emergency-and-the-totalitarian-drift-of-the-state-a-report-from-france", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/04/20/the-state-of-emergency-and-the-totalitarian-drift-of-the-state-a-report-from-france", "title": "The State of Emergency and the Totalitarian Drift of the State : A Report from France", "summary": "It appears that the French Republic is reaching a tipping point. Everything indicates that the intensification of repression the must either lead to tyranny or provoke an uprising.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/20/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/20/header.jpg", "date_published": "2017-04-20T17:00:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:34Z", "tags": [ "France", "policing", "antifascism", "fascism", "antifa" ], "content_html": "It appears that the French Republic is reaching a tipping point, a fundamental break with the way that rule has functioned here for three decades. Everything indicates that the political legitimization of racism and violent policing must either lead to tyranny or provoke an uprising. These two forces—tyranny and revolt—define the moment we are experiencing in France today. The confrontation is now permanent. In the following report, the second installment in our series leading up to the French elections, we explore these developments and the prospects for revolutionary movements in France.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/20/img_6727.jpg\")
January 2016: Anarchist gathering in Ménilmontant (Paris) celebrating the Paris Commune.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/20/against-police-violence.jpg\")
March 2016: Demonstration against police violence.
\nToday, a year and a half after the declaration of the state of emergency, we count the dead, the wounded, the imprisoned. It has long been the case that ten to fifteen people die at the hands of the police each year in France, always from lower-income neighborhoods. But the level of violence has increased under the state of emergency, extending to the entire population. This supposedly exceptional regime, declared by the President after the attacks of November 13, 2015, gives the police extended power to arrest people, search premises without a warrant, and prohibit demonstrations. It bears a colonial pedigree: the legislation for the state of emergency was passed in April 1955, during the French occupation of Algeria.
\n\nAt the time, the aim of the exceptional regime was to forcibly subdue the Algerian nationalist movement by releasing state repression from any legal constraints. The special powers it gave to the police led to the generalization of torture and summary executions in Algeria and also in France. A state of emergency is the hallmark of arbitrary repression and the establishment of a security regime; it paves the way for escalating racist violence and the opening of internment camps, without doing anything to prevent further terrorist attacks.
\n\nThe rise of identity-based discourse across the entire spectrum of the political class over the past thirty years has led to this: the designation of certain categories of the population as enemies, creating a covert war within the national territory that is justified by racist discourse and the legitimization of the police. In December 2015, a month after the state of emergency was declared, police officers brutally beat Zohra Kraiker and her two sons. In July 2016, Adama Traoré died in the hands of the gendarmes at the age of 24. In February 2017, a 22-year-old man, Theo, was beaten by the police and raped with a nightstick. In March 2017, police murdered Liu Shaoyo, a 56-year-old Chinese citizen, at his home in front of his children.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/20/movement-againt-labor-law-1.jpg\")
April 2016: Tear gas in Place de la Nation during the movement against the labor law.
\nThe lessons of thirty years of designating internal enemies and using working-class districts as a laboratory of repression are now being deployed against demonstrators of all stripes. It is inherent in this exceptional regime that it tends to extend its scope. The first unsanctioned demonstration under the state of emergency resulted in 344 arrests, without anyone being charged with a single crime; this set the tone for everything that followed. The police have arrested and injured thousands of protesters at the demonstrations of the past year, whether sanctioned or unsanctioned. At least 2031 political activists and trade union members have faced trial over the past 13 months.
\n\nFrance is a police state. No police officer has ever been convicted, even for murder, if the police unions support him. In recent months, armed, hooded, and aggressive police officers have held dozens of unauthorized street demonstrations of their own. The police were received in the Presidential Palace and received 250 million euros for new weapons. Two months later, a law was passed relaxing the conditions that justify self-defense for the police, giving them a license to kill. The murder of Liu Shaoyo took place only a month later.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/20/movement-againt-labor-law-2.jpg\")
May 2016: Jets of paint on the police, a must during protests against the labor law.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/20/movement-againt-labor-law-5.jpg\")
May 2016: This unit is not the police, it is a corps of the army, called mobile gendarmes, deployed more and more frequently during demonstrations.
\nThe totalitarian drift of the state and institutionalized racism is even more blatant in the case of migrants. Living on the streets, they suffer cold and sickness; they are dehumanized, harassed, and imprisoned. Officers arrive early in the morning, take position in a neighborhood where migrants sleep together, and surround them with the now-familiar kettle. Sometimes they kettle an entire neighborhood, locking up everyone they catch, residents included. At the police station, migrants are often asked to sign an OQTF form (accepting the obligation to exit French territory within 30 days) on the false premise that it is an application for a place in a shelter.
\n\nBetween July 31 and December 1 of 2016, more than 5000 migrants were arrested in the street, many of them repeatedly. More than 200 were placed in detention centers, and hundreds received orders to leave France. When not simply denying the facts outright, politicians use the state of emergency and the fear of terrorism to justify these police operations; in reality, they take place mostly on the margins of the law, with the aim of ensuring that migrants do not assert their rights. There are centers of “administrative detention” in which migrants are locked up, accused of only one crime: not being citizens.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/20/migrants-1.jpg\")
August 2016: Migrants demonstrating against police violence in Paris.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/20/migrants-2.jpg\")
Migrants threatened by police, who deny them the right to be where they are (in the street), without offering them any alternative.
\nFrance is proud to be the homeland of human rights. But chartered rights granted by a government or sovereign can also be revoked on account of real or imagined emergencies. Like people in the United States, we live in a country that can deny rights and put people on lists, often for purely political reasons. After the attacks, coinciding with the declaration of a state of emergency, the President proposed inscribing in the constitution “la déchéance de nationalité,” the ability to revoke the French nationality of any person committing an offense “constituting an attack on the fundamental interests of the nation.” This proposal has been withdrawn, formally speaking, but it continues in practice. In the eyes of the state, the inhabitants of working-class neighborhoods are sub-citizens, just as migrants are subhuman.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/20/france.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/20/be-ungovernable-1.jpg\")
June 2016: In Paris, the police surrounded the union hall to prevent the workers who met there from going to the demonstrations. This is the first time that such a thing has happened in France; before, the union halls were untouchable.
\nLikewise, the rights of those who are ostensibly considered citizens may be revoked if they exceed the narrow framework of behavior permitted by the state. This is being inflicted on Antonin Bernanos at this very moment. He was arrested on the testimony of an anonymous informant—who lawyers later discovered to be a cop—on the charge of having participated in the burning of a police car during a demonstration against a gathering of extreme right Police Unions. His guilt has never been proven; at best, he is accused of having been present at the demonstration in question, or of frequenting the “antifa environment.” In spite of all this, he spent 10 months in prison, in “preventive detention,” until his trial. Then he obtained the right to be released pending his first hearing, but this right is subject to a measure of exile: he must leave Paris to live in the north.
\n\nIndeed, pre-trial detention and exile measures have been used extensively over the past year and a half. This form of banishment takes us back to the Middle Ages, showing that the rights of the citizens may be suspended at any time.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/20/secret-service.jpg\")
June 2016: In this truck, positioned at the edge of a demonstration against Labor Law and protected by anti-riot policemen, we guessed there was a IMSI-Catcher, an apparatus for intercepting communications within a given perimeter, the use of which has been legalized by surveillance laws voted after the terrorist attacks.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/20/movement-againt-labor-law-6.jpg\")
June 2016: First time at a demonstration, and already injured by police.
\nPeople challenged the state of emergency in the street starting from the very first day. Since November 2015, simply meeting in public space is an act of rebellion.
\n\nThe year 2016 saw a long and tenacious social movement, a rare thing with the Left in the Presidency. Finally, autonomous confrontational elements began taking the head of the demonstrations—“le cortège de tête”—rather than the back, as was traditional in France. Revolted by police violence, more and more people joined the autonomous bloc to confront the police. Even “Nuit Debout” rejected the state of emergency.
\n\nThe support committee for Adama Traoré succeeded in organizing an exemplary mobilization, despite fierce judicial repression. To break the mobilization, the police sent several of the murdered young man’s brothers to prison. But every time the police killed or injured someone, it only renewed the mobilization: wild demonstrations took place every day for three weeks in Paris and its suburbs after young Theo was raped by police, and the murder of Liu Shaoyo has revived the mobilization again.
\n\nIn some cities, the outrage has gone so far that the Socialist Party and the Prime Minister were forced to cancel their meetings for fear of confrontation. This occurred in Rennes, where no demonstration is ever reported to the authorities in advance, a tradition since the police murdered a trade unionist in 1968. At a time when all the candidates in the upcoming election are vying with each other for the backing of the police, and are trying to define a “French identity” on a clearly racist basis, it is delightful to observe that in the streets, the identity that is asserting itself more than skin color or religion is best summarized by the slogan everyone chants at demonstrations: “Tout le monde déteste la police.”
\n\nEveryone hates the police.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/20/police-car-burned.jpg\")
May 18: A police car burned by demonstrators during a protest against the gathering of far-right Police Unions against “anti-cop hatred.”
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/20/antifa-demo.jpg\")
June 2016: An antifascist demonstration in memory of Clément Meric, an antifa comrade beaten to death by far-right Skinheads in 2013.
\nThe presidential election appears to affect nothing in this situation, as if it were taking place in another world. The only notable change is that some masks are falling. The corruption cases of the political elites follow one after another.
\n\nA series of scandals have beset the candidate of the Right. First, he fictitiously employed his wives and his two children with the money of the Senate. Then he was offered clothing tailored by a lobbyist of French neo-colonization in Africa. Then it was an undeclared loan of 50,000 euros, then a watch offered, then checks from the Senate. The same candidate maintains that while earning 20,000 euros a month he cannot manage to put money aside. He presents a program of austerity while living in a castle and taking advantage of public funds. In spite of all this, he maintains his candidacy and says he is a victim of a set-up. To galvanize his base, he has been radicalizing his speech and spreading conspiracy theories. This puts him at the same level of speech as the extreme right candidate Marine Le Pen, since the two are contesting the same electorate.
\n\nThe third candidate is the neo-liberal candidate Emmanuel Macron. Previously, he was a banker at Rothschild and a member of the current President’s government, but he still claims to represent a break with the political class in business. In this election, he is positioned as a pro-European and thus appears to be the best candidate, compared with the probability of Marine Le Pen reaching the second round. The reality is that his alternative to national isolationism is simply the individualized personal isolation of neoliberalism. He wants to continue the destruction of the labor code that he began when he was the minister responsible for the budget; he wants to make employees face their bosses alone, without trade unions or laws to defend them. In the neoliberal model, we will not live anywhere, we will travel by Uber from one Airbnb to another, blown about “flexibly” before the winds of the market, without ever meeting anyone except those we do business with, and we will spend our pay just to be able to work.
\n\nThe fourth candidate is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate of the supposed “radical left,” who has been contorting himself skillfully not to appear as such—for example, by making crowds sing the national anthem for him, distributing thousands of French flags in meetings, or advocating the return of military service. Even as a “radical leftist,” he does not take many risks; like the entire French political class, he has adopted most of the identity discourse that was previously exclusive to the far right. Mélenchon is the candidate who promises to renew the Left as a way to restore the strength of state.
\n\nThe polls place these four candidates neck and neck, so it is difficult to guess who will be in the second round of elections, though the far-right candidate and the neo-liberal candidate seem to be the favorites. In any case, whoever is elected will inherit and maintain the repressive apparatus that the previous governments have put in place. In this regard, the election offers only bad choices: do we prefer to be governed by an overtly authoritarian government, or by a covertly authoritarian government?
\n\nBut we should also watch how many people will abstain from voting. Each of the four candidates claims to break with the establishment, but they are all connected to it, whether via their direct interests or their class interests. It seems that more and more people understand this. Furthermore, holding elections while the state of emergency is still in effect, so it is possible to prohibit any demonstration, raises doubts about the “democratic” nature of the situation.
\n\nAll these institutions exist above all to preserve capitalism. No change will be possible without confronting them directly, by popular mobilization. Besides, as the writer Georges Darien put it, “Only revolutionaries think that honesty is really possible.” In order to live honestly, we must break down the hierarchies that corrupt humanity.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/20/cortege-de-tete.jpg\")
June 2016: The autonomous force.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/20/movement-againt-labor-law-7.jpg\")
June 2016: Lonely cops in the Place des Invalides during a demonstration against Labor Law.
\nFor all these reasons, our anti-authoritarian movement bears a tremendous responsibility. We must be able to welcome all the new people who are coming to us, to offer them political perspectives and propositions that can be put into practice. If we fail to do so, they may swing to the other side, the side defined by identity and nationalist isolationism. This is our hour. We have to rise to this situation—this situation that we have desired for a long time—or bear the consequences.
\n\nTake responsibility for being inclusive and welcoming.
\nIntensify the force of attack while protecting the participants and supporting the victims of repression.
\nDevelop the ability to accommodate several forms of expression in our demonstrations, as not everyone may be able to confront the police physically. It should be possible to support confrontational tactics in a variety of ways.
\nControl the narrative. It is not enough to despise the society of the spectacle; we must gain ascendancy over it.
\nImprove life immediately. This includes all the autonomous practices our movement has developed, such as opening squats to house people, redistributing food, and helping those who have problems with the police to hide when they have to, especially migrants.
\nFinally, laugh—laugh a lot. Give ourselves the means to laugh by inventing actions that are both offensive and enjoyable.
\nImagine something better than this closed world would constrain our imaginations to. Our survival is closely linked to our ability to imagine a world that is wider and freer and richer than this small world of padlocks, property lines, and batons that is presented as immutable.
\nText courtesy of Radical Cinema.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/20/paris-est-une-fete.jpg\")
Paris is a party.
\nOn April 15, “alt-right” supporters of Donald Trump invaded Berkeley, physically attacking people in the name of white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and nationalism while the police looked on. A large number of them were outright fascists who had converged from around the United States in hopes of creating an advertisement for right-wing violence. Finally, the Trump regime is getting the street cadre it needs to graduate to the next stage of fascism. Setting aside disingenuous arguments that the best way to support free speech is to promote totalitarian ideas, we have to ask ourselves—who are these people? Why are they attracted to fascism? And how do we stop this phenomenon from spreading?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/17/01.jpg\")
Why do oppressed people side with tyranny?
\nWhen you find yourself on the receiving end of oppression, there are three ways you can respond. The first is to make common cause with others who are also experiencing oppression in order to defend and expand spaces of freedom and autonomy. This probably means working with people who are worse off than you, as they are more likely to revolt than those whose lives are more comfortable. Choosing this approach requires courage, humility, and a certain amount of risk tolerance.
\n\nThe second option is to knuckle under and accept your lot. This is what most people do in the US: they slog through their routines under the watchful eyes of bosses, police patrols, surveillance cameras, NSA employees, and Facebook networks in a world that accords them less and less freedom. However, this strategy is becoming increasingly untenable as the various crises of our time intensify.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/17/10.jpg\")
\nThe third and final option is to identify with your oppressors, embracing their agenda and projecting your agency onto them. The more powerful they become, the more powerful you feel. As a strategy to improve your life, this has nothing to recommend it: associating your interests with those who hold power over you can only worsen your situation. But for those who lack strength of character, who are so desperate for a respite from their feelings of powerlessness that they are willing to go on giving up power in return for it, this option can be seductive.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/17/06.jpg\")
\nThis explains how millions of poor people could rally behind a billionaire. Having given up on gaining any real power in their own lives, all that remains to them is to participate willingly in their own oppression—and to assist their oppressors in wielding power over others.
\n\nThey are the fan-boys of tyranny. In return for serving as lackeys and bootlickers, they hope to bully others in the way that they themselves are bullied. They do this free of charge—they don’t even warrant a paid position at the bottom of the official hierarchy. They are the ideal underlings: craven and submissive towards those in authority, cruel and abusive towards themselves and others.
\n\nTheir identification with those in power is always a kind of cosplay: they can only be a pathetic imitation of the tyrants they look up to. They ape the Spartans, the Romans, the Nazis, who themselves were pathetic imitations of an idealized image of manhood, mere cogs in a military machine. All who prostrate themselves before abstract ideals rather than valuing real existing humanity in all its diversity are condemned to despise themselves.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/17/13.jpg\")
\nAlthough bullies can appear to be powerful, everything they do to wield power only disempowers them. To have real power, you have to be based in a community that supports you in freely disposing of your potential as you see fit, which requires building meaningful ties with those who are different from you. Bullies give up on this, relying on force in their relations with others rather than interchanging care. Lacking any sense of self-worth, having given up on accomplishing anything meaningful to enrich others’ lives or their own, the only form of pride that remains to fascists is membership in an abstract category. They do not consider themselves valuable as individuals, but only as citizens, white people, “Western chauvinists,” members of a gang. This is the consolation prize of identity, reserved for weak individuals who feel that they have no value on their own merits.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/17/08.jpg\")
\nThis consolation prize does not come cheaply. To obtain it, they have to crush everything beautiful in themselves, everything that renders them capable of empathy or creativity. They must contort their sexuality. They have to memorize mantras of entitlement—for those who benefit from unfair advantages, however slightly, are always nagged by the sneaking suspicion that they do not deserve what they have. They have to work hard not to identify with others, not to recognize themselves in those who are different from them, not to stand out as unique.
\n\nThis sort of self-policing is a full-time job. Rendering themselves helpless and weak before their overlords, they imagine they are rooting out weakness. Destroying everything in themselves that could render them capable of freedom, they imagine they are defending their freedom. Rendering relations of mutual trust impossible, they tell themselves they are protecting their communities.
\n\nAt the bottom of all their sadism, we find a fundamental masochism. To justify their behavior, they need to be on the receiving end of violence. They must be at once master race and underdog, torturer and victim. Carrying out genocides, they protest that they are the ones targeted for genocide. Wracked with self-loathing, on some level they must genuinely desire to be exterminated for the exterminations they hope to carry out.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/17/02.jpg\")
\nIn fact, it is their own leaders who are victimizing them—think of all the Nazis who died carrying out orders for Adolf Hitler, and all the money pouring into the pockets of savvy businessmen like Donald Trump at the expense of the suckers who support them. Above all, they are victimizing themselves, giving up their agency in return for the addictive experience of being a cog in the machinery of violence.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/17/04.jpg\")
\nTo protect themselves from recognizing this, they require external threats. Where such threats do not exist, they must be created. This is the meaning of the Muslim Ban, for example: it is intended to create outsiders, to provoke them into reciprocal violence. Bullies who offer nothing of value to humanity can only hope that some symmetrical threat can make them look good by comparison. If ISIS did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it; Islamophobic violence is intended to accomplish precisely this.
\n\nThese goons are of great use to the authorities. They can carry out attacks that the state is not yet able to, intimidating those who might otherwise rebel. They distract from the institutionalized violence of the state, which is still the cause of most of the oppression that takes place in our society. Above all, they enable the authorities to portray themselves as neutral keepers of the peace. Yet in clashes between fascists and those who oppose them, the police are anything but neutral. This explains why we saw a large number of unmasked fascists attacking masked demonstrators in Berkeley: those who defend themselves against rising fascism must conceal their identities so the police do not charge them with criminal activity, while unmasked fascists are free to assault people with knives and guns without fear of police intervention.
\n\nAt a time when so many people feel powerless—both because the unfair advantages they used to have are eroding and because life is becoming more difficult for all but a few wealthy people—to be given a free hand to take out their frustration on those weaker than themselves is seductive indeed. This is what Trump, Putin, le Pen, Erdogan, and other aspiring despots are hoping poor people will do with their resentment. If they can create a feedback loop in which the more oppression is inflicted on people, the more people identify with them, their power will be secure forever.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/17/07.jpg\")
\nSo what do we do? How do we fight against the spread of fascism?
\n\nFirst, we have to make sure that it is impossible for fascists to experience the thrill of wielding power over others. To promote fascism to the poor and angry, fascists have to be able to demonstrate that they can offer the cheap pleasure of bullying people. If they are able to create advertisements for oppressive violence, they stand to gain tremendous numbers. This is why it is of paramount importance that we confront and defeat fascists whenever they try to take the streets, and that we do so by any means necessary.
\n\nThis is not a battle we can afford to stand aside from. If we do not prioritize this now, we will pay a grievous price later.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/04/17/11.jpg\")
\nMore importantly, however, we have to solve the problems that produce the fascist mentality in the first place. In response to widespread poverty, powerlessness,\nand isolation, we have to show that it is possible to work together across different lines of identity, we have to propose collective solutions to the problems of our time and pose effective resistance to those who would take away our freedom. Otherwise, without any viable alternatives, people will continue to gravitate to fascism.
\n\nFinally, above all, we have to spread another set of values, another set of desires. To oppose fascism, we must resist the temptation to respond reactively to others’ violence, to militarize ourselves, to build symmetrical machines of war. When we resist, we should do so in ways that undermine the very foundations on which fascist narratives are constructed. We should become more compassionate, more creative, more unique and romantic and outrageous. In place of essentialist ways of conceiving selfhood, we have to celebrate difference and change within and between us; in place of authoritarian notions about government, we have to cultivate a profound collective hunger for freedom.
\n\nIf we can do these things, neither fascist street violence nor state oppression will be able to stem the tide of change. Good luck, dear friends.
\n\n" } ] }![“blood and soil”](\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_Soil#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-H1215-503-009,_Walther_Darr%C3%A9_bei_einer_Kundgebung.jpg\"){kind=link}