On July 5, 2023, the Greek government evicted a Kurdish refugee camp in Lavrio, Greece. The camp had existed for many decades, serving as an important center of organizing in southeastern Europe. The Turkish government’s war on Kurdish people, the Greek government’s war on autonomous spaces, and the European Union’s war on migrants all intersected in this operation. In the following analysis, Beja Protner shows the connections between the various forms of systematic oppression involved here. For more information about ways to support movements for Kurdish liberation, you could consult Rise Up 4 Rojava and the Emergency Committee For Rojava.
\n\nOn July 5, 2023, between 3 and 6 am, Greek state forces raided and violently evicted the self-organized Kurdish refugee camp in Lavrio, Greece. Located about 60 kilometers from Athens, the camp had been home to political refugees from Turkey and Kurdistan for decades. Without notice, more than 250 police officers, riot police (MAT), and heavily armed special police forces (EKAM) sent by the Ministry of Asylum and Migration evicted the residents of the camp—less than 60 people, a third of whom were young children. The refugees were forcefully transferred to the Oinofyta Refugee Camp, located in an abandoned factory in a deserted area far from any kind of urban settlement.
\n\nThe eviction, which Greek officials called a “humanitarian intervention,” looked to the Kurdish and left-wing political refugees from Turkey and Kurdistan more like the sort of dawn raids that had forced many of them to flee from their homelands and seek refuge in Greece in the first place. The Greek forces broke the gate of the camp, stormed into people’s homes, pointed laser-sighted rifles at the people—including families and children—and dragged them outside.
\n\n“Even in Turkey [the state forces] don’t use that much technology in house raids,” commented Welat, a young political refugee from North Kurdistan (Turkey), who had lived in the Lavrio camp for five years after escaping persecution in Turkey. As Leyla, who had lived in the camp with her husband and three small children recounted, the residents were given only half an hour to collect their essential belongings before police forces occupied the camp and forbade entry. Some of those who resisted the eviction were violently restrained with their hands handcuffed behind their backs. Leyla tried to calm down her daughter by telling her it was toy guns being pointed at them. “But the child knew what they were, from back in Turkey,” Leyla said. “My children have seen many things that they never deserved.”
\n\nAll 57 residents, including eight woman and nineteen children, were detained and transferred to the Oinofyta refugee camp, located in an abandoned factory far from any kind of urban settlement.
\n\n“Where are we? What is this place?” Layla asked when we met through the blue metal fence of the camp’s gate after the Greek guards denied me access to my friends. An elderly Kurdish refugee had just returned empty-handed from an hour-long search under the burning midday sun for a shop where he could purchase something to eat or drink. It was 2 pm, and the refugees had still not received any food since their forceful relocation at 6 am. “The children, hungry!” the elderly refugee tried to explain in a few Greek words to the security personnel sitting in a small cabin at the gate.
\n\nIn stark contrast with the autonomous, self-sufficient, and centrally-located Lavrio camp, Oinofyta is a prison guarded by government-appointed security officials who control the entries and exits. Even when people are permitted to go out of the camp, the surrounding area is largely deserted, isolating them and rendering them dependent on the state’s notoriously poor provision of basic necessities.
\n\n“Why did they do this to us?” asked Diana, a teenage girl from Northeast Syria (Rojava), as she held my hands through the blue fence.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/07/24/1.jpg\")
Oinofyta refugee camp, established in an abandoned factory in a deserted area, had been closed down on account of unlivable conditions. It was re-opened to accommodate the forcefully displaced residents of the Lavrio camp. After eight hours, a truck sent by the Greek state brought some food for them. Entry was denied to all visitors despite the objections of the refugees. Photo: Vedat Yeler, July 5, 2023.
\nThe lives of the Lavrio camp residents were turned upside down in a single day, depriving them of liberty and autonomy. On July 4, they were living in a free and safe self-organized political community that had existed for over 40 years. The next day, they were spatially and socially marginalized refugees, imprisoned and dependent on the state—while the state destroyed their homes in the historic buildings of Europe’s oldest refugee camp, closing a chapter in the history of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement in Greece. The destruction of the Lavrio camp is a historic moment at which European anti-refugee policies and the Greek right-wing crackdown on autonomous political spaces intersect with Greek and Turkish international relations and the war on Kurds, revealing their interconnections.
\n\nOver the past four years, the right-wing New Democracy (Νέα Δημοκρατία, ND) government in Greece has placed two priorities at the top of its agenda: waging war on migrants and destroying autonomous political spaces. Since New Democracy came to power under Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in 2019, police have evicted and sealed dozens of political squats in urban centers. Many of those were hosting refugees and other migrants who had no other access to dignified housing in Greece.
\n\nSince 2015, Greece has served Europe as a “container” for unwanted migrants and refugees. According to the Dublin Regulation, asylum seekers are required to apply for protection in the first European Union country of their entry; alongside the closing of the internal EU borders in 2016, this clogged the asylum systems in the countries on the margins of the EU like Greece. The slow, incomprehensible, and constantly changing Greek asylum system has made the process of acquiring legal status into a living hell for countless people.
\n\nMost people have to wait for several years for their asylum interview, during which they have limited or no access to housing, financial assistance, healthcare, or education. During that time, their temporary documents continuously expire and they are forced to live as sans papiers [undocumented people] due to delays at the Asylum Service. This administratively induced legal precarity renders people vulnerable to “sweep” operations in central Athens, in which police kidnap people without valid residency documents and take them to prison-like camps and detention centers where the living conditions are abominable.
\n\nThe migration and asylum policies of the New Democracy government constitute a war on migrants. Doing the dirty work of European anti-migration racist hysteria as the “shield of Europe,” the Greek-Turkish land and sea border has become the site of illegal pushbacks—an unofficial but systematic strategy of returning incoming migrants to Turkey without any possibility of applying for asylum. This includes those fleeing from political persecution of the Turkish state.
\n\nThe Greek police, Frontex, border guards, coast guards, collaborating gangs, and local vigilantes carry out such pushbacks every day on a massive scale, violating a number of international laws and conventions. In addition to violating the right to apply for asylum, they consistently inflict police brutality, enforced disappearance, torture, sexual abuse, and unofficial detention in overcrowded cells with no access to food, water, or toilets. In the Evros region of northeastern Greece, in addition to carrying out pushbacks near the border, they have also kidnapped people from the streets or from camps in areas as far inland as Thessaloniki. After being subjected to multiple forms of mistreatment and humiliation by masked border guards and collaborating gangs, migrants have been brought to the Evros river, forced into rubber dinghies at gunpoint, and transferred across the border to Turkey. In some cases, people have been abandoned on small river islets without food, water, or medicine, exposed to the elements.
\n\nIn the Aegean and Ionian Sea, the Hellenic Coast Guard and Frontex have been responsible for countless pushbacks and deaths. Boats in distress are routinely refused rescue and left to sink or towed towards Turkey. In some cases, the coast guard has deliberately damaged the engines of boats before leaving them adrift in the open sea near the Turkish waters. In other cases, people have been abandoned at sea in rescue boats without engines. The Greek government seeks to legitimize these actions with a discourse about “security,” playing on racist anti-immigration sentiments in Greece and across Europe. Consequently, the Evros river and the Aegean Sea have become open graves for those fleeing from wars, persecution, economic devastation, and climate catastrophe.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/07/24/2.jpg\")
Political refugees from Kurdistan and Turkey in Greece, together with local and international activists, protest pushbacks and violence on the Greek/EU borders at the Ministry of Migration and Asylum in Athens. Photo: Vedat Yeler, June 8, 2022.
\nIn the context of the criminalization of migrants and migration, Greek refugee camps have become high-security prisons. While the living conditions in these places are notoriously horrific, they are also spatially and socially isolated, far from any urban centers. Most of the camps near urban centers that afforded residents some access to employment (even if precarious and exploitative), healthcare facilities, and education for children have been forcefully evicted. In the isolated camps like Oinofyta to which refugees are forcefully transferred, they are rendered dependent on the state’s inadequate provision of basic necessities.
\n\nThe border and camp policies of the Greek state both follow a genocidal logic of “cleansing” that resembles the processes involved in the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and similar events in several ways. These include the idea of getting rid of an unwanted population by any means available; gradually escalating discourses and practices of dehumanization, which become normalized; the “banality of evil,”1 apparent in the attitudes of police and border officers, bureaucrats, and camp employees; and finally, the choice of the vast majority of citizens to accept these practices so as not to see migrants around them or in their country. In effect, many citizens of Greece and other countries within the European Union have adopted the basically genocidal idea that these people should not be here, that they should be prevented from being here or made to disappear by any means. At the same time, these citizens refuse to acknowledge the means being used and the things being done to people subjected to a regime of annihilation.
\n\nThe Kurdish refugee camp of Lavrio was one of the last places that resisted this system of incarceration and annihilation with the values and practices of “free life together”(hevjiyana azad/özgür eş yaşam) arising from the Kurdistan Freedom Movement. In Lavrio, revolutionary refugees from Kurdistan and Turkey lived for decades in the center of the coastal town alongside locals and tourists. In contrast to the state-run prison camps, the Lavrio camp has been entirely self-managed since the withdrawal of the state seven years ago, surviving with the support and donations of local and foreign charities, NGOs, solidarity groups, and philanthropists. International and local activists, researchers, journalists, and photographers frequently visited the camp and were warmly welcomed as guests.
\n\nThe Lavrio camp was a lived utopia, a world-to-be put into practice. Life in the camp was organized according to the principles of Democratic Confederalism, a system of self-organization into communes, committees, and assemblies, described by the leader of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement Abdullah Öcalan as a way of collectively creating a peaceful, safe, and harmonious communal co-existence between humans and the environment as an alternative to the logic of the nation-state.2 Relations of gender equality, comradeship, mutual aid, respect, and care for other people, animals, and the environment characterized everyday life in the Lavrio camp. It was a place where individuals, youth, families, and children from Turkey and all four parts of Kurdistan (occupied by Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria) found safe haven and a home after escaping from war, political persecution, torture, imprisonment, and the threat of life. As many of the residents noted, it was “like Kurdistan,” a piece of homeland abroad; a Kurdistan that was free from violence and patriarchy, where Kurdish and left-wing political exiles could recover from traumatic experiences of violence, express their culture and politics freely, and rebuild their community. Many residents chose to continue living in the Lavrio camp after gaining asylum in Greece, in order to continue taking part in this project of “free life together” and because they felt safe in the camp and in the town of Lavrio.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/07/24/3.jpg\")
The Lavrio camp was a safe space for families. In the past years, the residents built a playground for children. Across four decades, thousands of children lived and grew up in the camp. Photo: Beja Protner, March 2023.
\nThe Lavrio camp was one of the oldest refugee camps in Europe. It was established in 1947 with the official name of “Lavrio Center of Temporary Stay for Foreign Asylum Seekers” in order to host refugees of Greek origin (“expatriates”) fleeing from the Soviet Union.3 According to a research report from 1950, the camp hosted about 300 people, including families and individuals of different nationalities from the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Albania, and Romania who fled persecution in their countries of origin. The needs of the refugees were addressed by the International Refugee Organization (IRO), the United Nations Mission in Greece, in collaboration with the Greek authorities. Over the following years, it was inhabited by asylum seekers from various countries, chiefly from the Balkans and the Middle East.3 Political refugees from Turkey became the most numerous residents of the camp in the 1980s after the military coup in Turkey on September 12, 1980, when Turkey came under the rule of a Sunni-nationalist military junta that tortured, imprisoned, killed, and forced into exile tens of thousands of Kurdish and left-wing people.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/07/24/4.jpg\")
For four decades, Lavrio refugee camp was a self-organized space of free life together, struggle, and solidarity. Photo: Beja Protner, March 2023.
\nWhile the Greek state was technically in charge of the camp, leading asylum procedures and providing food, medical care, and basic necessities, the revolutionary refugees organized themselves via communes and assemblies. A political community of exiles was built, based on the collective experience of self-organization of collective life in the political prisons of Turkey. The Lavrio camp was not only a space of refuge but also one of the most important spaces of political organizing in exile in Europe.
\n\nIt was also a space of international solidarity and comradeship. Since the 1980s, various Greek left-wing organizations, unions, and solidarity groups have visited the camp and publicly asserted the revolutionary refugees’ right to asylum, political work, employment, healthcare, and better living conditions. The refugees also built connections with Greek left-wing parties and organizations, and engaged with the wider population by producing and distributing leaflets and magazines in Greek explaining the situation of political oppression in Turkey and calling for a wider Turkish-Greek solidarity.
\n\nIn the 1990s, large numbers of Kurdish refugees, especially families, arrived in the Lavrio camp due to the political violence in North Kurdistan (in Turkey). In the context of the growing popularity and mobilization of the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Kurdistan in the 1990s, the Turkish state’s attacks in Kurdistan increasingly targeted civilians, with campaigns by the Turkish army and paramilitary organizations that included mass murder, enforced disappearances, torture, and mass imprisonment. It was during this period that the camp acquired its Kurdish-majority character and became centered around the PKK-led Kurdistan Freedom Movement. Thanks to the solidarity between the Kurdish and Turkish refugees and Greek left-wing groups, the refugees regularly organized cultural events across Greece, which were widely attended by locals. They also participated in local festivals, sharing music, food, and informative materials.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/07/24/5.jpg\")
In the Lavrio camp, every aspect of daily life was organized according to Democratic Confederalism and the principles of “free life together.” The residents kept the spaces clean and tidy and decorated them with revolutionary symbols. Each room was a commune within which money and basic necessities were shared, and the cleaning and cooking responsibilities were distributed fairly among comrades. Photo: Beja Protner, January 2023.
\nAfter the civil war in Syria (2011), the Islamic State attack on Kurdish regions in Syria (2014) and genocide against Yazidi Kurds in Sinjar, Iraq (2014), and Turkey’s invasions of Kurdish-majority areas in North Syria (starting in 2018), large numbers of displaced Kurdish refugee families from Syria found refuge in the Lavrio camp. In 2016, owing to political pressure from Turkey, the Greek government wanted to close down the camp, but hundreds of residents resisted. Subsequently, the Greek state withdrew all services and abandoned the camp at the peak of humanitarian need. From then on, the camp was entirely autonomous. The residents collectively organized and shared responsibilities for cleaning, cooking, basic medical assistance, repairs, and distributing the donations such as food, cleaning and hygiene products, and clothes that were provided by the various charities, NGOs, philanthropists, and solidarity groups that frequently visited the camp.
\n\nIn the last years, especially following the Rojava Revolution in North and East Syria after 2012, the Kurdish movement has enjoyed increasing attention and support of the international(ist) community in Greece and elsewhere. Like the refugee camp in Maxmûr in Iraq in the Middle East,4 the Lavrio camp became a center of Democratic Confederalism in Europe, implementing the model of self-organization centering women’s self-liberation, grassroots democracy, and ecology practiced in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Rojava). Sometimes seen as a miniature of Rojava, the Lavrio camp gained its international significance as a center for new transnational connections and a place of political education and practice built on more than 40 years of revolutionary struggle in Kurdistan and political organizing in exile.
\n\nFor four decades, the Lavrio camp was not only a space of refuge, but also a center of Kurdish and left-wing political organizing, international connections, comradeship, and intercultural encounter. Every year, the Lavrio camp hosted the celebrations of Newroz on March 21, the New Year for a number of West Asian peoples and the Kurdish holiday of resistance and renewal. The event was visited by a wide range of refugees, Greeks, and international youth, joining them—literally through govend, the traditional Kurdish circular dances—into a circle of mutual recognition and solidarity.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/07/24/6.jpg\")
A Newroz celebration on March 21, 2022. Every year, hundreds of Kurdish and Turkish political refugees in Greece, Greek locals, and international visitors joined the Newroz celebration in the Lavrio camp and danced around the bonfire. Photo: Beja Protner, March 2022.
\nJust like the eviction of dozens of self-organized squats across Greece, the New Democracy government’s decision to destroy the Lavrio camp constitutes an attempt to eliminate the transnational solidarity that the camp hosted and facilitated. At the same time, it was an attack on the revolutionary history that the camp contained. The camp’s buildings were almost a century old; every inch of them bore traces of the revolutionary determination, communal labor, and comradeship of the tens of thousands of people who had passed through the camp, grown up in it, participated in repairing it, and made it home for themselves and for their successors. With the destruction of the Lavrio camp, a part of this collective history is deliberately erased.
\n\nThe Kurdish refugee journalist Vedat Yeler has called the eviction and destruction of the Lavrio camp a “NATO gift to [Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan.” The eviction took place only a few days before the summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on July 11 in Vilnius, Lithuania, where both Greece and Turkey were to be present. The two NATO members have wrangled over the Cyprus conflict and territorial disputes in the Aegean Sea for many decades. In mutual populist slander, Turkish politicians have been accusing Greece of harboring “terrorists” in the Lavrio camp and pressuring the Greek state to close it down for years. However, since the re-election of both Erdoğan’s Sunni-nationalist regime in Turkey and Mitsotakis’ New Democracy government in Greece in May and June, 2023, respectively, there has been a shift in bilateral relations between the two countries. During a visit in Cyprus a few days before the eviction, the Greek Foreign Minister expressed a commitment to improve relations with Turkey. The attack on Kurdish political refugees in Greece can be understood as an attempt to showcase these efforts before the NATO summit.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/07/24/7.jpg\")
After eviction, the Lavro camp was given over to the municipality of Lavrio, which immediately painted over the revolutionary political symbols that had decorated the camp for decades. This was a political gesture, sending the message that the revolutionary politics will not be tolerated under the New Democracy government. Photo: Beja Protner, 15 July, 2023.
\nThis is not the first time that the Kurds have been used as a tool in regional geopolitics and in the management of the relations within NATO. One previous occasion in which the Greek state played a crucial role was the February 15, 1999 international conspiracy that led to the capture of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Kurdish movement had enjoyed public support from the Greek mainstream and left-wing politicians and public. When Öcalan was exiled from Syria, he sought refuge in Europe and was harbored by the Greek intelligence service. However, under pressure from the EU and NATO, he was refused refuge in Greece and transferred to the Greek embassy in Kenya, where he was handed over to Turkish intelligence. As a result, with Greece’s direct complicity, Öcalan was imprisoned for life on the Turkish island of İmralı in complete isolation.
\n\nIn 1999, Kurdish refugees and other revolutionary refugees in Greece joined thousands of local supporters in protesting what many older Greeks recall as one of the most shameful actions of the Greek state. Today, with the eviction of the Lavrio camp, the Kurdish movement has seen once again that they cannot trust any state, but must rely on the solidarity of people.
\n\nFor many years, NATO has backed Turkey’s political violence and war crimes in the Middle East. With the second biggest army in NATO, the Turkish state has been waging an unequal war against the PKK guerrillas in Kurdistan, committing acts of political violence and war crimes against the guerrillas, the local population, and the environment, including ecologically devastating fires and chemical weapon attacks. Turkey has also materially and logistically supported ISIS and other jihadist gangs in Syria and Iraq in their fight against the Kurds. Moreover, Turkey has shelled, invaded, and occupied a number of Kurdish-majority areas in North and East Syria, where it has employed jihadist mercenaries to terrorize and abuse the local populations, causing thousands to flee. As things stand today, geopolitically, a member of NATO can do all this without any meaningful reaction from international institutions.
\n\nRecently, relations between Turkey and other members of NATO have resulted once again in violence against Kurdish refugees and other political refugees from Turkey abroad. In 2022, when Finland and Sweden decided to join NATO in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Turkey targeted Kurdish refugees as a bargaining chip in negotiations. Turkey vetoed Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO membership and was only willing to agree to it on the condition that they hand over political refugees residing in their countries to be imprisoned (or worse) in Turkey. This trafficking in humans indeed took place, with Sweden extraditing a number of political exiles to Turkey.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/07/24/8.jpg\")
Political refugees from Kurdistan and Turkey regularly organize demonstrations in central Athens to protest political oppression in Turkey, the imprisonment of Abdullah Öcalan, military invasions and assassinations of activists in Rojava (Syria) and Başûr (Iraq), the use of chemical weapons against the PKK guerrillas in the mountains of Kurdistan, and to condemn the silence of the European and international institutions in face of Turkey’s crimes. Photo source, 20 November, 2022.
\nThe European Union and NATO have continuously collaborated in the criminalization of the PKK and (pro-)Kurdish activists, adopting the “terrorism” discourse that Turkey uses to legitimize massacres, the use of chemical weapons, the mass persecution of political dissidents, journalists, and lawyers, and military invasions that have forced millions of people into exile. The discussions leading up to the NATO summit of July 11 have resulted in developments that further threaten the Kurdish political community at home and in exile. For example, Erdoğan met with Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and agreed to forward Sweden’s accession protocol to the Grand National Assembly for ratification on the condition that NATO pledges to appoint a “special coordinator for counterterrorism” and that Sweden collaborates in addressing Turkey’s “security concerns” (in other words, the existence of politically organized Kurds) under a new bilateral Security Compact. This can only mean more persecution of Kurds in exile and more extraditions of political refugees who try to find safety in Europe.
\n\nIt is not clear whether Erdoğan and Mitsotakis discussed the Kurdish and Turkish political community in Greece at their meeting during the NATO summit on July 12. However, the eviction and destruction of the Lavrio camp sent the message that the Greek state is siding with Turkey in its century-long project of annihilating Kurds in Turkey and elsewhere.
\n\nWhen we consider the position of Kurds in NATO geopolitics alongside the European Union’s racist war on migrants, in both of which the Greek state sides with the oppressor, it becomes possible to see how the integrated systems that Öcalan and the Kurdish movement call the “forces of Capitalist Modernity”2 are waging a war against free life.
\n\nWhile the Turkish government continues to displace millions of people from Turkey and Kurdistan, many of whom seek asylum in Europe, the EU guards its borders with genocidal methods and discourses, pouring billions of euros into Turkey in order to block migration from the Global South. According to the so-called EU-Turkey Deal of 2016, the EU paid the Turkish state 3 billion euros in order to accommodate and contain migrants and refugees from the Global South who try to reach safety by traveling through Turkey. As a continuation of this deal, Greece has in 2021 declared Turkey a “safe country” for refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. However, people from these countries have no means to gain asylum in Turkey, due to its outdated asylum legislation. They have limited access to residence rights, housing, and legal employment, and are increasingly exposed to deportations and refoulement [the forcible return of refugees to a country where they are liable to be subjected to persecution], economic and sexual exploitation, and racist attacks and murders, legitimized and encouraged by racist anti-refugee discourse. Kurds from Turkey are familiar with these forms of systematic violence, which have been normalized through decades of discrimination against non-Turkish minorities.
\n\nGiven the lack of transparency in the corrupt Turkish state, it is difficult to say how much EU money has been used to accommodate the 10 million refugees there, most of whom live in deplorable living conditions. At the same time, Turkey has exponentially expanded its stockpiles of weapons and military, repression, and surveillance technologies. Surely, the EU “refugee money” has been used to intensify the war against the Kurds both at home and abroad, driving millions more to seek refuge in Europe and the rest of the Global North.
\n\nIn addition to money, the EU has also been supporting Turkey in its silence regarding the systematic mistreatment of refugees and political dissidents in Turkey, as well as Turkey’s political violence, sponsoring of jihadists, military interventions, and war crimes. Erdoğan has answered every tentative critique from EU officials with the threat of “releasing” refugees into Europe. Driven by systemic racist xenophobia, the EU remains complicit in face of Turkey’s violence against Kurds, left-wing revolutionaries, political dissidents, women and sexual minorities, and unwanted migrant and refugee populations, despite the fact that Turkey itself produces millions of refugees.
\n\nIn short: wherever the European “issue” with migrants and Turkey’s “issue” with Kurds intersect, people are killed, displaced, violently deterred, incarcerated, stripped of rights and, as a final act of dehumanization, used as tokens in blackmail, bargaining, and human trade between states.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2023/07/24/9.jpg\")
This mural picturing famous Kurdish and internationalist figures and martyrs of the Kurdistan freedom struggle covered the entrance into the Lavrio camp’s main building. In the star of the symbol of the PKK, the slogan in Kurdish says: “Our love for life is so great that we can sacrifice ourselves for it.” The Greek authorities painted over the mural after the eviction of the camp. Photo: Beja Protner, March 2023.
\nI undertook this essay to try to answer Diana’s question, “Why did they do this to us?” after she was evicted from her home with her family and the rest of the residents of the Lavrio camp. I have sought to show how NATO imperialism, the European war on migrants (including those fleeing from Turkey and Kurdistan), and Turkey’s war against Kurds and political dissidents have been intertwined in regional and global power relations. Those suffering oppression, political violence, and economic exploitation—and resisting them by seeking a freer life through migration, autonomous self-organization, and self-defense—are under attack at every step.
\n\nToday, the ruins of the Lavrio revolutionary refugee camp, which was a safe haven for political refugees and a cradle of internationalist solidarity for decades, attest to the violence of what the Kurdish Movement calls Capitalist Modernity—an integrated system in which life is devalued, exploited, and extinguished. In the face of such a massive force, which has impacted the residents of the Lavrio camp directly but threatens all of us, the only way to persist is by establishing international solidarity and a common struggle against all the borders and injustices of today’s world.
\n\nThose of us who hope to act in solidarity with Diana and with all who are oppressed and struggling must ask what are we going to do to defend the sort of “free life together” that we learned about in Lavrio. Without its inhabitants and their politics, it is just an old wrecked building. We must not let its ruins become an image of the future.
\n\nWe can do this by speaking out and taking action in response to systematic state violence, and by organizing with oppressed populations against the criminalization of those who seek freedom and better life, whether at home or in exile. Let us honor the history of the Lavrio camp by building alternative spaces of “free life together” that connect revolutionaries, migrants and refugees, locals, and all the oppressed. Let the legacy of the Lavrio camp live on in many new self-organized spaces of comradeship, internationalist solidarity, and struggle.
\n\nThe header image shows the self-organized camp for political refugees from Kurdistan and Turkey in Lavrio, Greece. Photo: Beja Protner, March 2023.
\n\nIn Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), Hanna Arendt discussed the “banality of evil” in the Holocaust in regards to the case of the Nazi official Adolph Eichmann, who was responsible for transferring people to concentration camps. With the concept of “banality of evil,” Arendt argued that bureaucrats participating in atrocities are “normal people” working within an ordered system, disengaged from the consequences of their acts, rather than inherently evil sadists. ↩
\nÖcalan, Abdullah (2020). The Sociology of Freedom: Manifesto of the Democratic Civilization, Volume III. Oakland, CA: PM Press. ↩ ↩2
\nDirakis, Yannis (2019). “Claiming the right to the camp – An ethnography of the squatted Lavrio Center of Temporary Stay for Foreign Asylum Seekers” Unpublished master’s thesis. Maastricht: Maastricht University. ↩ ↩2
\nSee Dirik, Dilar (2022). “Mexmûr: From displacement to self- determination (Ch. 23).” In The Kurdish Women’s Movement: History, Theory, Practice. London: Pluto Press. ↩
\nToday, after years of protest, the authorities in Richmond, Virginia are finally removing a 12-ton statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, the largest remaining Confederate monument in the United States. This is an opportunity for Democratic politicians to promote the narrative that they are the ones who can reckon with the legacy of white supremacy in the United States, encouraging anti-racists to focus on state-led forms of social change. It is also a chance to narrow the debate about public monuments to Confederate statues alone, when in fact the demand to remove Confederate statues is just one element of a much broader movement against all forms of structural white supremacy, memorial and otherwise.
\n\nThe Lee statue is not coming down because law-abiding citizens participated peacefully in the democratic process until they succeeded in achieving a popular reform. If those who desire to see the Lee statue and others like it removed had confined themselves to the democratic process, all of those statues would still be in place, because that process disproportionately centers the agency of wealthy white conservatives and liberal politicians whose approach to social change is based chiefly in appeasement and empty promises.
\n\nIn neighboring North Carolina, after white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine Black people in 2015, the Republican-controlled state legislature prohibited the removal of “objects of remembrance” from public property. Politicians and university chancellors throughout the state cited this law to explain that it was impossible to remove statues from their towns and campuses, no matter how unpopular the statues were. In August 2017, after the murder of Heather Heyer during the fascist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, demonstrators in Durham, North Carolina took matters into their own hands, toppling their local Confederate monument in open defiance of the law and the police.
\n\nIn response to the action in Durham, the governor of North Carolina tweeted, “The racism and deadly violence in Charlottesville is unacceptable but there is a better way to remove these monuments.” If that were true, the statue would have been removed decades earlier. Even under a Black mayor and a majority-Black city council, the statue stood just as solidly as it had during the Jim Crow era of all-white government—until people took direct action.
\n\nOnce the statue was torn down, it stayed down, even in violation of the law passed by the state legislature. The same politicians who had not dared to take it down now did not dare to put it back up. Direct action gets the goods. Demonstrators followed suit in nearby Chapel Hill a year later, tearing down a Confederate statue on the university campus in defiance of the chancellor’s protests that she did not have the authority to remove it, as much as she might like to. Again, once that statue was down, it stayed down—and politicians finally began to remove statues elsewhere, lest demonstrators continue to show up their weakness and hypocrisy.
\n\nIt does a disservice to the courage of countless demonstrators around the country to frame the removal of the Lee statue and other such monuments as an act carried out by the government. A great number of these statues have been removed by grassroots direct action, and practically all of the ones that were removed by government order were removed only for fear that demonstrators would remove them.
\n\nLikewise, the wave of statue topplings that has finally compelled Virginia authorities to remove the Lee statue was always about something bigger than reckoning with the shameful legacy of the Confederacy. As documented in the chronology below, throughout 2020, people vandalized a wide range of monuments, not just Confederate memorials. Far-right pundits and timid liberals sought to frame this as a “slippery slope” in which opposition to explicitly racist monuments would lead to desecrating supposed heroes of emancipation like Abraham Lincoln. But the statue topplings were not motivated by a narrow desire to defend the supposedly pristine legacy of the United States against the treasonous Confederate States of America; from the beginning, they were driven by a desire to confront structural white supremacy in all its forms, from slavery to colonialism and police violence.
\n\nThis was consistent with the values of the George Floyd uprising, during which these actions proliferated. The logic that led demonstrators to tear down monuments to Confederate soldiers was the same logic that motivated them to vandalize monuments to police departments that harass, incarcerate, and murder Black and Brown people in disproportionate numbers.1 It was the same logic that inspired some of them to tear down a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Portland, marking it with graffiti reminding everyone that Lincoln signed off on the murders of 38 Indigenous Dakota people.
\n\nAs we celebrate the removal of the Lee statue, we owe it to those whose actions made it possible to remember all that they accomplished and what they were fighting for. Their actions—documented, in part, in the following chronology—speak louder than words. The struggle against white supremacy is far from complete; we must not let small victories like the removal of the Lee monument offer a false sense of closure.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/7.jpg\")
The statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia.
\nSummer 2020 saw a wide range of protest activity across the country in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black people and people of color. A few days into the uprising, as people were storming police precincts, looting shopping districts, and lighting police cars on fire, some protesters began to turn their attention towards monuments honoring centuries of racialized exploitation and violence.
\n\nDemonstrators roving Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia tore down a large number of Confederate monuments, helping to catalyze scores of similar actions elsewhere around the country. Together, these efforts forced the government of Virginia to order the removal of the long-controversial statue of Robert E. Lee, just as they compelled many other politicians to make similar decisions around the country. Using direct action, demonstrators accomplished in minutes what civil complaints and reformist campaigns had failed to address for decades. In this context, even small gestures, such as scrawling a word or two on a pedestal, sufficed to incite public debate, if not the removal of monuments.
\n\nAs a whole, these actions have changed our landscape and altered our sense of both the past and the present. Cheers to everyone who took matters into their own hands.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/uheeuhaha/status/1270910984627146757\n\n\n
At a rowdy march honoring Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, demonstrators clash with police, barricade streets, attack law enforcement vehicles, light fires, and smash storefront windows. Outside the county sheriff’s office, protesters rip a hand off of a statue of King Louis XIV and tag it with “ALL COPS UPHOLD WHITE SUPREMACY.” A sign is left at the statue’s feet, “UNTIL ALL POLICE STATES BURN, WE FIGHT FOR BLACK LIVES,”
\n\nGive this demonstrator a hand.
\nAt a protest outside of the police headquarters in Bakersfield, California, demonstrators tag “BLM,” “KILL MORE COPS,” and “ACAB” on a memorial to police officers.
\n\nDuring a demonstration in Fayetteville, North Carolina against the killing of George Floyd, protesters break into the historic Market House, which once hosted slave auctions. The building catches fire. Though the fire is doused before it destroys the building, police charge two demonstrators with felonies.
\n\nIn Raleigh, North Carolina, people paint “RACIST” and “FUCK 12” on a Confederate monument near the state capitol building.
\n\nA protest passing a monument to Confederate Defenders in Charleston, South Carolina defaces it with red paint and the letters “BLM.”
\n\nIn Richmond, Virginia, people tag memorials to Confederate general Robert E. Lee, General J.E.B. Stuart, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, and the Confederacy itself. Some people paint and set fire to the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group responsible for erecting Confederate monuments across the country and resisting their removal. As the former capital of the Confederate States of America, Richmond is home to dozens of memorials to the Confederacy, from stained glass in churches to grandiose statues along Monument Avenue. Over the following days, protesters in Richmond attack these symbols relentlessly, forcing the city to remove many of them.
\n\nRichmond, Virginia.
\nAt a protest in Norfolk, Virginia, demonstrators climb onto a Confederate monument, tag it, and cover it in toilet paper.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/2.jpg\")
Norfolk, Virginia, May 30.
\nIn Nashville, Tennessee, protesters topple a statue of Edward W. Carmack, a US Senator, segregationist, and newspaper owner who championed lynchings.
\n\nDuring a night of rioting in Grand Rapids, Michigan, someone scrawls “PIG” on a police memorial.
\n\nIn Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, protesters tag a statue of “tough-on-crime” racist Mayor Frank Rizzo with the letters “FTP,” unsuccessfully try to pull it down, then light a fire at its base.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/1.jpg\")
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, May 30.
\nDuring a protest in Sacramento, California, “FUCK THE POLICE” appears on a memorial to police officers. Protesters also leave signs reading “SAY HIS NAME” and “BLACK LIVES MATTER.” That night in Washington, DC, George Floyd demonstrators target a number of monuments, including the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a statue of Revolutionary War figure Casimir Pulaski, and the National Law Enforcement Memorial. The latter is tagged with the word “MURDERERS.”
\n\nIn Cleveland, Ohio, a rowdy anti-police demonstration stops by the US Soldiers and Sailors Monument and tags it with the words “GEORGE FLOYD,” “FTP,” “COLONIZERS,” “TAMIR RICE,” and “NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE.” Protesters also take an American flag from the memorial.
\n\nIn Lincoln, Nebraska, protesters rampage through the city, smashing windows, fighting riot police, and lighting at least one building along Lincoln Mall on fire. The mall also holds a statue of President Abraham Lincoln, which protesters cover in yellow paint.
\n\nThat night, vandals target monuments throughout the country. On the campus of the University of Mississippi in Oxford, people paint red handprints on a Confederate memorial and write “spiritual genocide” across it.
\n\nProtesters in Birmingham, Alabama pull down a statue of banker, industrialist, and Confederate officer Charles Linn. The crowd also attacks a nearby obelisk dedicated to soldiers and sailors of the Confederacy. Throughout the night, rioters smash windows and set fires throughout Birmingham.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/BrittanyDtvNews/status/1267273168818966531\n\n\n
In Athens, Georgia, demonstrators pause by a Confederate monument to write “BLACK LIVES MATTER” and “GEORGE FLOYD” on it.
\n\nOver the weekend in Dayton, Ohio, a roadside police mural reading “SUPPORT, COMMUNITY, HOPE, AND PEACE” is defaced twice. The first artist paints over the image of a police officer’s face with the visage of a pig. The second one adds graffiti expressing criticism of police.
\n\nIn Antwerp, Belgium, demonstrators cover a statue of King Leopold II in red paint. Leopold oversaw the colonization of Congo in the late 1800s, during which the Belgians enslaved, maimed, and killed millions of people—as detailed in Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa.
\n\nProtesters in Montgomery, Alabama topple a statue of Lee outside of the Robert E. Lee High School. For years, students, parents, and alumni had asked that the predominantly Black school be renamed and the statue be removed. In response, police charge four people with felonies.
\n\nIn Asheville, North Carolina, demonstrators surround the Vance Memorial, tagging it with “ACAB,” “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” “FUCK 12,” and “SLAVES SOLD HERE!” Zebulon Baird Vance was a captain in the Confederacy and later a senator for and governor of North Carolina. He oversaw white supremacist policies during his time in office.
\n\nAt the end of a weekend of looting and rioting in Mobile, Alabama, demonstrators vandalize a statue of Admiral Raphael Semmes with the words “CONFEDERATE SCUM” and “ACAB.”
\n\nVandals set fire to a statue of King Leopold II in Antwerp, Belgium. This is the second time that the statue has been targeted in four days. A number of Leopold statues are defaced and torn down throughout the country over the coming months.
\n\nPrince Laurent, the great-great-great-great nephew of Leopold II, charges that the protesters are misguided on the grounds that his ancestor never set foot in Congo—as if kings ever do their own dirty work.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/4.jpg\")
Antwerp, Belgium, June 3.
\nA police memorial in Virginia Beach, Virginia is vandalized with paint.
\n\nIn Jacksonville, Florida, people write “BLM” and dump red paint onto the “Women of the Southland” Confederate monument.
\n\nPeople discover that a Confederate monument has been vandalized in Williamsburg City, Virginia. The memorial’s flag has been crossed out and “BLM” painted across its base.
\n\nProtesters pull down a statue of Confederate General Williams Carter Wickham in Richmond, Virginia. Members of the crowd spray-paint and urinate on the statue.
\n\nIn New London, Connecticut a march in honor of those killed by the police stops by a Christopher Columbus statue. Protesters chant “TAKE IT DOWN!” and spray-paint the statue red. Over the next week, vandals repeatedly paint the statue red, forcing the mayor to remove it.
\n\nIn Iowa City, Iowa, a demonstration makes it way by Kinnick Stadium. In response to the outing of Chris Doyle, the football strength and conditioning coach, for years of racist comments towards players, protesters tag the stadium and the statues outside it with “TREAT YOUR PLAYERS RIGHT,” “ACAB,” and “FUCK THE KKK.”
\n\nOvernight, vandals deface a number of Confederate monuments throughout Atlanta, Georgia, including the “Lion of the Confederacy,” covering the monument in red paint and adding the letters “BLM.” Over the following year, many more attacks occur targeting Confederate memorials throughout Atlanta.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/5.jpg\")
Atlanta, Georgia, June 6.
\nPeople topple a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, England. Protesters roll the statue through the streets and dump it in Bristol Harbour.
\n\nThe same day, outside Parliament in London, demonstrators deface a statue of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, charging him with racism and advocacy of colonialism.
\n\nIn Louisville, Kentucky, vandals dump paint on a statue of Confederate officer John Breckinridge Castleman. Like many of these monuments, the Castleman statue has been vandalized repeatedly over the years.
\n\nVandals in Fort Worth, Texas deface a police memorial with “FUCK 12,” “BLM,” and “ACAB.”
\n\nShortly before dawn in Louisville, Kentucky, police arrest three people, accusing them of vandalizing a statue of King Louis XIV outside the office of the county sheriff. Black paint had been sprayed on the statue along with the words “GEORGE FLOYD,” “WE WILL WIN,” and “BLM.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/6.jpg\")
Louisville, Kentucky, June 9.
\nIn St. Paul, Minnesota, members of the American Indian Movement pull down a Christopher Columbus statue at the state capitol.
\n\nA demonstration in Richmond, Virginia targets a Columbus statue as well, toppling it, lighting it on fire, and dumping it in a nearby lake.
\n\nThat night, in Boston, Massachusetts, vandals behead a statue of Columbus.
\n\nIn Griffin, Georgia, vandals deface multiple Confederate memorials, writing “FUCK THE POLICE,” “PEOPLE OVER PROPERTY,” and “BLM” on them.
\n\nProtesters in Richmond, Virginia topple a statue of Jefferson Davis.
\n\nA hundred miles away in Portsmouth, Virginia, protesters attack a Confederate monument. Four statues are beheaded and one pulled down.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/8.jpg\")
Portsmouth, Virginia, June 10.
\nThat night, vandals cover Columbus statues in red paint in Houston, Texas and Miami, Florida. Someone hangs a sign on the statue in Houston reading “RIP THE HEAD FROM YOUR OPPRESSOR.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/9.jpg\")
Houston, Texas, June 10.
\nIn Lothian, Maryland, someone damages a statue of Confederate Private Benjamin Welch Owens.
\n\nAt Fort Donelson in Dover, Tennessee, vandals deface a Confederate monument with “END WHITE SUPREMACY,” “ACAB,” “TAKE ME DOWN,” “BLM,” and “DEFUND THE POLICE.”
\n\nIn Savannah, Georgia, people put a white hood over a bust of Confederate Major General Lafayette McLaws and stencil a black fist across it.
\n\nIn Brussels, Belgium, people vandalize a statue of King Leopold II.
\n\nIn Hamilton, New Zealand, vandals cover a statue of the town’s namesake, Captain John Hamilton, with paint. After serving as a British naval officer in China and Crimea in the mid-1800s, Hamilton fought to put down Māori rebellions in New Zealand. With a Māori-led protest that threatens to tear down the statue scheduled days away, the city removes the statue.
\n\nIn Brussels, people put red paint on a bust of King Baudouin, the Belgian monarch who oversaw genocide in Congo in the mid-1900s, and write “REPARATION” on the monument’s pedestal.
\n\nIn the Hague, Netherlands, vandals throw red paint onto a statue of Piet Hein. In the 1600s, Hein was as a vice-admiral for the Dutch West India Trading Company and a privateer. Hein tried to seize colonies in Central and South America from Spain, committing genocide as he did. Hein also worked to take control of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
\n\nDuring daily protests outside the state capitol in Atlanta, Georgia, police arrest a person for writing “TAKE IT DOWN” on a statue of plantation owner, Confederate general, and governor John Brown Gordon.
\n\nA police memorial in Richmond is vandalized with red paint and the words “JUSTICE FOR ALTON”—a reference to Alton Sterling, a Black man murdered by Baton Rouge police officers.
\n\nIn Philadelphia, someone writes “COMMITTED GENOCIDE” on a memorial to George Washington.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/10.jpg\")
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, June 11.
\nAn ax-wielding vandal nearly decapitates a Delaware law enforcement memorial. When police arrive on the scene, all they find is the ax and a urine-soaked Delaware flag.
\n\nIn Pretoria, South Africa, someone covers statues of Paul Kruger and two Boer soldiers in red paint, writing “KILLER” and “I CAN’T BREATHE” on the monument. Kruger was a military officer, president of South Africa, and white supremacist during the second half of the 1800s.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/11.jpg\")
Pretoria, South Africa, June 12.
\nVandals in Ballarat, Australia deface the busts of former prime ministers, covering them in red paint and draping one in an Aboriginal flag. In Sydney, protesters vandalize a statue of Captain James Cook. The 18th-century explorer was the first European to chart many parts of the Pacific, paving the way for genocide. In Perth, Western Australia, someone vandalizes a statue of Captain James Stirling. As the first Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Western Australia, Stirling committed the Pinjarra Massacre, among other acts of colonial genocide.
\n\nIn Melbourne, Australia, vandals paint “DESTROY WHITE SUPREMACY,” “STOLEN LAND,” and “FUCK COOK!” on a memorial to Captain Cook.
\n\nIn Milan, Italy, people cover a statue of journalist Indro Montanelli in red paint. Montanelli fought in the 1930s to colonize Ethiopia and was an enthusiastic supporter of fascism, penning articles about the superiority of the white race and supporting Italy’s control of North Africa. While stationed in Ethiopia, Montanelli bought and sold a 12-year old Eritrean girl.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/12.jpg\")
Milan, Italy, June 13.
\nProtesters take a bust in New Orleans, Louisiana depicting businessman and slave owner John McDonogh and toss it into the Mississippi River. In retaliation, police arrest least two people.
\n\nProtesters topple and drag statues in Eugene, Oregon celebrating white settlers, “The Pioneer” and “The Pioneer Mother.”
\n\nIn Providence, Rhode Island, people throw white paint on a Columbus statue. Prosecutors charge three people with felonies but the charges are later dropped. The previous year, someone had doused the same Columbus statue in red paint and left a sign reading “STOP CELEBRATING GENOCIDE.”
\n\nA year later, in June 2021, a group of teens in nearby Westerly, Rhode Island follow up by pelting a Columbus statue with eggs and blue paint.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/13.jpg\")
Providence, Rhode Island, 2019.
\nIn the early hours of the morning, vandals in Chicago, Illinois place a white hood over a statue of George Washington. They fling white paint at it and write “SLAVE OWNER” and “GOD BLESS AMERIKKKA” on it.
\n\nMeanwhile, in Wilmington, North Carolina, people vandalize a Confederate memorial with paint.
\n\nCalling themselves “Justice 4 Jayson” in honor of 15-year-old Jayson Negron, who was murdered by police in 2017, protesters in Bridgeport, Connecticut set up camp outside the police department. During the occupation, someone writes “FUCK THE POLICE” on a police memorial.
\n\nProtesters in Portland, Oregon pull down a statue of Thomas Jefferson outside Thomas Jefferson High School.
\n\nIn Silver Springs, Maryland, protesters spray-paint a Confederate monument.
\n\nIn Little Rock, Arkansas, vandals damage a memorial to Confederate soldiers.
\n\nOvernight in Dover, Delaware, someone stencils “BLACK LIVES MATTER” on the Delaware State Police Memorial.
\n\nIn Fort Wayne, Indiana, vandals write “BLM,” “QUIT PIGS,” and “ACAB” on a memorial to deceased police officers.
\n\nProtesters in Richmond, Virginia topple another Confederate monument.
\n\nIn Macon, Georgia, someone writes “HOW OFFENDED ARE YOU NOW?” at the base of a Confederate memorial, a reference to those who are more offended by the vandalism of monuments than the things they stand for.
\n\nSomeone pours a bucket of red paint on a police memorial in Baltimore, Maryland and writes “I CAN’T BREATHE” on its base.
\n\nIn White’s Ferry, Maryland, vandals pull down and deface a Confederate memorial, writing “RACIST” beside it. The statue had originally been in Rockville, Maryland, but was moved to White’s Ferry after someone wrote “BLACK LIVES MATTER” on it in 2017.
\n\nIn Columbus, Ohio, a statue of the city’s namesake is vandalized with black and red paint.
\n\nIn Nashville, Tennessee, someone writes “THEY WERE RACISTS” on a Confederate memorial in Centennial Park and throws red paint on it.
\n\nIn St. Louis, Missouri, town employees quietly removed a statue of Christopher Columbus from Tower Grove Park. The statue had long been controversial; it was only the outpouring of rage against racist and colonial statues that compelled the city authorities to take action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/31.jpg\")
Nashville, Tennessee, June 16.
\nA demonstration in Charleston, South Carolina targets the John C. Calhoun monument. Calhoun was a statesman from South Carolina—a long-time US senator and two-time vice president—who championed white supremacy and states’ rights. In the 1830s, he led the faction promoting “nullification,” a precursor to South Carolina seceding from the Union three decades later. Protesters cover the monument with signs, tag it, and throw eggs at it. Police arrest nine people in retaliation.
\n\nIn Silver Springs, Maryland, vandals target another Confederate memorial, pulling the monument down and leaving a note claiming responsibility:
\n\n\n\n\n“Here lies 17 dead white supremacists who died fighting to keep black people enslaved. The Confederacy was and always will be racist. Let this marker be a more accurate depiction of history because the last one was a disgrace. PS—We toppled the Confederate statue at White’s Ferry.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/14.jpg\")
Silver Springs, Maryland, June 17.
\nIn Vaughn, Ontario, vandals spray-paint a statue of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
\n\nOn the eve of Juneteenth, demonstrators in Portland, Oregon attack a statue of George Washington. After covering its face in a burning American flag, people pull it down and write “YOU’RE ON NATIVE LAND” and “BLM” on it.
\n\nIn San Francisco, California, statues of Francis Scott Key, Ulysses S. Grant, and Junípero Serra are toppled. Key is famous for writing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but also owned slaves and during his work as a lawyer, prosecuted runaways and abolitionists while defending the rights of slave owners. Grant was a Union general and Reconstruction-era president who oversaw slaves before the war and committed genocide against Native Americans after it. Serra was a missionary who established settlements ranging from Querétaro, Mexico to San Francisco, California, forcibly converting, enslaving, and abusing Native people along the way. Over the past five years, a number of Serra statues have been decapitated and covered in red paint.
\n\nOvernight in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, vandals cover a statue of John A. Macdonald in red paint. Macdonald was Canada’s first prime minister and established the residential school system. In the course of their existence, the schools took over 150,000 Indigenous children from their parents and forcibly taught them European values. Thousands of children were abused and killed at the residential schools.
\n\nAs of August 2021, 4100 Indigenous children have been documented as having died at Canada’s residential schools. Throughout the summer of 2021, people have defaced and toppled statues of Macdonald, Queen Victoria, and Catholic figures throughout Canada and set Catholic churches on fire in retribution for the Church’s involvement in Native genocide.
\n\nA demonstration outside the capitol in Raleigh, North Carolina targets a Confederate monument. After police thwart the first attempt, people succeed in ripping two life-size statues off of the monolith and drag them through the streets. The crowd leaves one statue dangling from a streetlight and the other on the steps of a courthouse. The next day, city employees remove all the remaining Confederate monuments.
\n\nIn Phoenix, Arizona, protesters dump red paint on a memorial to Confederate troops outside the capitol.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/15.jpg\")
Phoenix, Arizona, June 19.
\nIn Washington, DC, protesters tear down a statue of Confederate Brigadier General Albert Pike and set it on fire.
\n\n\n \n\n \n
During an anti-police demonstration in Toronto, Ontario, someone writes “BLM” on a police memorial.
\n\nA demonstrator flings red paint on a statue of George Washington in Baltimore, Maryland.
\n\nIn Nuuk, Greenland, a statue of Danish missionary and colonizer Hans Egede is splashed with red paint and tagged “DECOLONIZE.” Egede founded a colony in Greenland in the early 1700s on Inuit land, revitalizing European interest in the island and paving the way for European colonial settlements. Police make an arrest in connection to the vandalism.
\n\nSomeone writes “BLM” on a Confederate monument in Brunswick, Georgia.
\n\nIn Santa Fe, New Mexico, vandals place red handprints and write “RACIST” and “END GENOCIDE” on a memorial to Union troops who fought against Native Americans. Until protesters chiseled off the dedication in the 1970s, the memorial was dedicated to troops who fought against “savage Indians.”
\n\nIn Jacksonville, Florida, vandals fling red paint on a statue of Andrew Jackson and write “SLAVE OWNER” on it. Jackson enslaved over a hundred people, led troops against the Seminole People as a general during the Florida Wars, and, while president, ordered the forcible relocation of all Native Americans across the Mississippi River. Thousands of people died from exposure, disease, and starvation as they were forced west along the Trail of Tears.
\n\nIn Carmel, Indiana, people put red paint on the hands of a statue of a police officer and wrote “IT COULD HAPPEN HERE” (i.e., police could kill someone) on its back.
\n\nAmid ongoing protests in Washington, DC, protesters boldly attempt to topple a statue of President Andrew Jackson across the street from the White House. Some write “KILLER,” “RACIST SCUM,” and “BLM” on its pedestal before police prevent protesters from pulling it down. From within his well-guarded palace, Trump threatens protesters with ten years imprisonment.
\n\nVandals in Jacksonville hit the President Jackson statue in their city again, writing “REMEMBER MAY 28, 1830” on it—a reference to the Indian Removal Act.
\n\nDuring the early morning hours, vandals in Worcester, Massachusetts cover a Columbus statue in red paint. This marks the second time in a month that the statue has been defaced.
\n\nVandals in Anderson, South Carolina paint a Confederate monument red.
\n\nOvernight in Winnepeg, Canada, vandals dump white paint on a statue of Queen Victoria. Her sixty-four year reign saw the subjugation and murder of countless people around the globe as a consequence of the colonial ambitions of the British Empire. In summer 2021, protesters tear down the Victoria statue along with a statue of Queen Elizabeth I.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/17.jpg\")
Winnepeg, Canada, June 23.
\nVandals in East Memphis, Tennessee throw red paint on a Columbus statue.
\n\nAmid ongoing anti-police protests, demonstrators in Denver, Colorado pull down a statue dedicated to Christopher Columbus.
\n\nIn Kansas City, Missouri, two vandals are caught defacing a statue of President Andrew Jackson. They succeed in covering the statue in red paint and writing “SLAVE OWNER” on it before police arrest them.
\n\nPresident Trump issues Executive Order 13933, “Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence.” The order threatens protesters who target monuments with ten years imprisonment under the Veterans’ Memorial Preservation and Recognition Act of 2003. It also threatens to withhold funding to prosecutors and police departments that do not make a point of attacking and repressing protesters. Trump’s order reads, in part,
\n\n\n\n\n“Over the last 5 weeks, there has been a sustained assault on the life and property of civilians, law enforcement officers, government property, and revered American monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial. Many of the rioters, arsonists, and left-wing extremists who have carried out and supported these acts have explicitly identified themselves with ideologies—such as Marxism—that call for the destruction of the United States system of government. Anarchists and left-wing extremists have sought to advance a fringe ideology that paints the United States of America as fundamentally unjust and have sought to impose that ideology on Americans through violence and mob intimidation. They have led riots in the streets, burned police vehicles, killed and assaulted government officers as well as business owners defending their property, and even seized an area within one city where law and order gave way to anarchy…”
\n\n“My Administration will not allow violent mobs incited by a radical fringe to become the arbiters of the aspects of our history that can be celebrated in public spaces. State and local public officials’ abdication of their law enforcement responsibilities in deference to this violent assault must end.”
\n
Later in the day, Trump tweets an FBI wanted poster showing fifteen protesters, exclaiming “Ten year prison sentences!”
\n\nIn Columbia, South Carolina, a device filled with flammable stump remover is found near the state capitol. The smoldering device was placed at the base of a statue of governor and white supremacist Benjamin Tillman. Police charge two people with felonies.
\n\nIn Franklin, Ohio, a monument to Robert E. Lee is damaged with paint and eggs. The ground next to it is tagged “NO RACIST MONUMENTS.”
\n\nIn the early morning hours, vandals throw red paint across two statues of George Washington in Manhattan, New York.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/18.jpg\")
Manhattan, New York, June 29.
\nPresident Trump takes to Twitter with his signature gratuitous use of capitalization:
\n\n\n\n\n“We are tracking down the two Anarchists who threw paint on the magnificent George Washington Statue in Manhattan. We have them on tape. They will be prosecuted and face 10 years in Prison based on the Monuments and Statues Act. Turn yourselves in now!”
\n
Over a year later, in September 2021, no one has been arrested for the vandalism.
\n\nMeanwhile, in Pensacola, Florida, someone throws red paint across a monument to Confederate soldiers.
\n\nVandals in Frederick, Maryland cover multiple memorials to Confederate soldiers in red and topple two statues. One loses its limbs; the other, its head.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/19.jpg\")
Frederick, Maryland, June 29.
\nDuring a protest in Louisville, Kentucky, people extinguished an “eternal flame” dedicated to police officers and wrote “NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE” nearby.
\n\nPeople removed dozens of Confederate flags from graves in Resaca, Georgia and used them to spell out the words “STOP RACISM.”
\n\nIn Lothian, Maryland, people topple a statue of Confederate Private Benjamin Welch Owens. It is the second time in a few weeks that the statue has been vandalized.
\n\nIn Seattle, Washington, people pull down and deface a memorial to Confederate soldiers in Lake View Cemetery.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/20.jpg\")
Seattle, Washington, July 3.
\nOvernight in Buffalo, New York, people vandalize a monument to President William McKinley with the letters “BLM.” McKinley was president during the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars and sent troops against striking workers. The anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated him in Buffalo in 1901.
\n\nDemonstrators in Sacramento, California spray-paint a statue of colonizer and missionary Junípero Serra, then tear it down.
\n\nProtesters in Baltimore, Maryland topple a Columbus statue and throw it into Baltimore Inner Harbor.
\n\nOvernight, in Waterbury, Connecticut, a statue of Columbus is beheaded. Police later charge one person.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/21.jpg\")
Waterbury, Connecticut, July 4.
\nVandals tear down a memorial to Confederate troops at Green Hill Cemetery in Greensboro, North Carolina.
\n\nIn East Memphis, Tennessee, people cover a Christopher Columbus statue in black paint and feathers. This is the second time in two weeks that the monument has been damaged.
\n\nVandals in Cornelius, North Carolina tag a Confederate memorial with “RACIST” and “BLM.” Police charge three people.
\n\nProtesters in Greensboro, North Carolina topple a Confederate monument.
\n\nA person is arrested in Columbia, Missouri while writing, “SAY HER NAME: SALLY HEMINGS” at the foot of a Thomas Jefferson statue on the Mizzou campus. Hemings was enslaved to Jefferson and had six children with him. It is likely that Jefferson initiated a sexual relationship with Hemings when Hemings was only fourteen years old.
\n\nVandals in Haverhill, Massachusetts take action against a monument to Hannah Duston that depicts Duston holding Native scalps, writing on the statue, “HAVERHILL’S OWN MONUMENT TO GENOCIDE.” In early May, demonstrators had used red paint to target another statue of Duston in Boscawen, New Hampshire, also depicting her holding scalps. The Alnôbak (Abenaki) took Duston captive in 1697 and killed her infant daughter during her captivity. Duston eventually escaped, but not before killing the Alnôbak family she was bound to and scalping them. She later received £25 for the scalps, a considerable sum.
\n\nIn Savannah, Georgia, people break the arms off the Confederate monument known as “Silence,” stenciling “SILENCE NO MORE” on it in large letters and splashing red paint on it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/22.jpg\")
Savannah, Georgia, July 9.
\nIn Little Rock, Arkansas, people cover a Confederate memorial in tags, including “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” “POWER TO THE PEOPLE,” and “STAY DEAD.” Later in the week, police make one arrest.
\n\nOvernight, four statues are vandalized throughout New Orleans. People push over a statue of John McDonogh and a bust of Confederate officer and state legislator Charles Didier Dreux. Vandals also cover a bust of Confederate Brigadier General Albert Pike in paint and write “DIE PIG” on it, then write “BLM” on a statue of Sophie B. Wright. Wright was a proud member of the Daughters of the Confederacy in the later 1800s. The bust of Dreux had its nose chiseled off in 2017 and “FUCK THIS SHIT” written on it in 2018.
\n\nOvernight, vandals damage a Confederate monument outside the Sampson County Courthouse in Clinton City, North Carolina.
\n\nAnother person is arrested at the statue of Thomas Jefferson in Columbia, Missouri, accused of throwing red paint on it.
\n\nVandals in Cape Town, South Africa use an angle grinder to decapitate a bust of Cecil Rhodes.
\n\nIn the 1890s, Rhodes was an incredibly powerful British colonizer. As prime minister of the Cape Colony in present day South Africa, Rhodes oversaw the theft of Indigenous land and the tripling of the amount of wealth one was required to possess in order to have the right to vote. As owner of the De Beers diamond company, Rhodes made a fortune on the exploitation of Black Africans. Rhodes is also the namesake of Rhodesia, later renamed Zambia and Zimbabwe.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/23.jpg\")
Cape Town, South Africa, July 13.
\nA statue of Ronald Reagan in his boyhood home, Dixon, Illinois, is vandalized with the words “BLACK LIVES MATTER.”
\n\nIn New Orleans, someone throws red paint on a statue of George Washington and writes “BLM” on its base.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/24.jpg\")
New Orleans, July 15.
\nFollowing a rally in Grant Park—the site of horrific police violence during the Democratic National Convention of 1968—hundreds of demonstrators outwit and outfight police officers, winning an opportunity to try to topple a statue of Christopher Columbus. They do not succeed in pulling down the statue, but their effort makes nationwide news, and the statue’s pedestal is left covered in graffiti and paint. Afterwards, both protesters and police require hospitalization.
\n\nChicago, July 17.
\nSomeone defaces a police memorial in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey with red paint.
\n\nOvernight in Savannah, vandals once again target the “Silence” monument in Laurel Grove Cemetery. Red paint and a swastika appear on the Confederate memorial. Nearby Confederate headstones are also defaced.
\n\nThe police headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri is vandalized during a demonstration against federal agents being brought to town to investigate violent crimes. “FUCK FEDS AND COPS” is written on the headquarters’ front doors and “FEDS GO HOME,” “NO ROOM 4 FASCISTS,” and “ABOLISH KCPD” appear on a police memorial.
\n\nDemonstrators in Toronto, Canada target a statue of John A. Macdonald, throwing paint on it and draping it with a banner that reads, “TEAR DOWN MONUMENTS THAT REPRESENT SLAVERY, COLONIALISM, AND VIOLENCE”.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/25.jpg\")
Toronto, Canada, July 18.
\nA monument in Nashville, Tennessee to Confederate and Union troops is vandalized with “BLM” and “EAT ASS AMERICA.”
\n\nOvernight, vandals push over a statue of Robert E. Lee in Roanoke, Virginia.
\n\nBy order of Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, town employees remove the statues of Christopher Columbus from Grant Park and Arrigo Park.
\n\nIn Richmond, Virginia, a march expressing solidarity with Portland demonstrators in response to local and federal police violence in the Northwest pivots toward the headquarters of the Richmond Police Department. Someone splashes red paint across the giant “big brother” installation representing the head of a police officer, adding a giant message reading “ACAB” beside it. Shortly after, a dump truck is set ablaze. Though police attempt to disperse the crowd with tear gas, the march regroups and continues moving through the city.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/32.jpg\")
Richmond, Virginia, July 25.
\nDuring an anti-police protest in downtown Los Angeles, California, demonstrators attack the federal building, breaking its glass doors, tagging the interior and exterior of the building, and defacing a memorial case holding the badges of deceased officers. Police respond in riot gear, leading to injuries on both sides.
\n\nIn Fort-de-France, Martinique, demonstrators tear down statues of Empress Joséphine and Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc. Joséphine was born on her family’s sugar plantation in Martinique, and when her husband Napoleon Bonaparte took power in France, Joséphine had slavery re-established on the island. Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc founded the first permanent French settlement in Martinque in 1635. The Joséphine statue in Martinque has been headless since 1991 and regularly covered in paint since.
\n\nPreviously, in May, Martiniquais protesters had torn down and destroyed two statues of Victor Schœlcher, known for writing the decree that abolished African slavery in France’s colonies in 1848. According to the protesters, “Schœlcher was undeniably against slavery, but when it was necessary to negotiate reparations, he only offered freedom to Blacks and gave financial compensation to the slavers for the loss of the free work of their captives!”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/26.jpg\")
Fort-de-France, Martinique, July 26.
\nPeople vandalize a police memorial in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Police say the memorial had been attacked already in May 2020 and twice in 2016 before that. One of the previous vandalisms involved someone beating on it with a crowbar, breaking off large chunks of it.
\n\nIn Huntsville, Alabama, vandals fling red paint at a Confederate monument outside the county courthouse.
\n\nA police memorial in Chicago, Illinois is vandalized with black paint.
\n\nPolice report damage to a police memorial in Colorado Springs, acknowledging that they have had to clean graffiti and other vandalism from the memorial a number of times since it was unveiled two years ago.
\n\nA Confederate memorial outside the county courthouse in Jackson, Tennessee is spray-painted with “TEAR IT DOWN.” In 2017, vandals tagged the memorial with “NO NAZIS” shortly after the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville.
\n\nVandals in Vaughn, Ontario once again spray-paint the statue of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
\n\nVandals in Darien, Connecticut fire paintballs at a police memorial outside the Darien Police Department.
\n\nVandals in Buffalo, New York dump a bucket of blue paint onto an Abraham Lincoln statue.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/28.jpg\")
Buffalo, New York, August 23.
\nSomeone writes “ACAB” and “FTP” on a police officer memorial in Springfield, Massachusetts.
\n\nIn Madison, Wisconsin, someone beats the police memorial outside the capitol with a sledgehammer. Later in the week, police make one arrest. The memorial was previously defaced with paint in 2017.
\n\nVandals in Victoria, Canada douse a statue of Captain James Cook with red paint. In summer 2021, protesters tear the statue down and toss it in the harbor.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/siiamhamilton/status/1410841470265921542\n\n\n
During an anti-police march in Montreal, Canada, protesters pull down a statue of John A. Macdonald.
\n\nDuring the early morning hours, someone once again defaces the scalp-holding statue of Hannah Duston in Haverhill, Massachusetts, dumping red paint on it.
\n\nOvernight in Little Rock, Arkansas, people deface police vehicles outside the North Little Rock Police Department, lighting one SUV on fire. Across town, “DANIEL PRUDE, SAY HIS NAME” and “DEFUND THE POLICE” are written on the Little Rock District Courthouse. Vandals also write “DEFUND THE POLICE” and “BREONNA TAYLOR” on a police memorial at a third location. The following morning, passersby yell at the Little Rock Police Chief during a news conference.
\n\nAfter an anti-police rally in Detroit, Michigan, vandals tag a statue of US General Alexander Macomb with “SLAVE OWNER LAND THIEF.”
\n\nTwo people in Charlottetown, Canada spontaneously knock over a John A. Macdonald statue and drag it through the street. The two are arrested.
\n\nIndigenous Misak protesters in Popayán, Colombia tear down a statue of conquistador Sebastián de Belalcázar. In the 1500s, Belalcázar established Spanish settlements in Nicaragua, Honduras, Colombia, and Ecuador, enslaving Native people and committing genocide in the process. The statue had been built atop El Morro del Tulcán, a Misak pyramid and holy site.
\n\nVandals hit the McKinley monument in Buffalo, New York—for the third time in a few months—writing “WARDEL DAVIS” on the monument and splashing red paint across it. Wardel Davis was a young black man killed by Buffalo police in 2017. The officers who killed him were later cleared of any wrongdoing. Police arrest one person in relation to the vandalism.
\n\nA monument to Confederate Major General Lafayette McLaws in Savannah, Georgia is defaced a second time. Vandals write “JUSTICE 4 B. TAYLOR” and “BLM” on it.
\n\nTwo cyclists biking along Schuylkill River Trail in Plymouth Township, Pennsylvania rip a Thin Blue Line American flag from a police memorial and throw it into the nearby bushes. The memorial’s bench was already defaced earlier in September.
\n\nVandals in Louisville, Kentucky dump red paint onto a statue of George Rogers Clark, writing “STOP WHITE WASHING BLACK HISTORY” at its base and hanging a banner on a nearby overpass reading “LMPD WILL KILL AGAIN. RISE UP.” Clark, the older brother of explorer and governor William Clark, was a slave owner and military officer who fought on the frontier during the Revolutionary and Northwest Wars. In the latter, he guided troops as they killed Native Americans and eventually drove them from their homes in the Ohio River Valley.
\n\nA statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest in Nashville, Tennessee is vandalized with the word “MONSTER.” Before the Civil War, Forrest was a plantation owner, cattle dealer, and slave trader. During the war, he worked his way up to become a general in the Confederacy. Under his command, at Fort Pillow, Confederate soldiers massacred hundreds of surrendering Black troops and white Loyalist troops from Tennessee. After the war, Forrest was the First Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan from 1867-1869. The statue of Forrest had pink paint thrown on it in 2017.
\n\nA state trooper memorial is defaced in Dennis Township, New Jersey.
\n\nPolice arrest six people in Collierville, Tennessee, accusing them of vandalizing a Confederate memorial in the town square. Police claim they caught the six while spray-painting the monument and dumping glue and feathers on it.
\n\nOvernight in Pueblo, Colorado, vandals splash red paint on a bust of Christopher Columbus.
\n\nAmid ongoing protests in Portland, Oregon, on Indigenous Peoples’ Day (also known as Columbus Day), demonstrators tear down statues of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Someone writes “Dakota 38” on the Lincoln statue, a reference to Lincoln approving the execution of 38 Dakota people following the US-Dakota War of 1862. Roosevelt was an enthusiastic expansionist in the late 1800s who helped push for America to get involved in the Spanish-American War, which resulted in America claiming possession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippine islands, and Hawaii.
\n\nFollowing a three-day occupation, a memorial once dedicated to US troops who fought “savage Indians” is toppled and destroyed by protesters in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Police arrest two.
\n\nOvernight in Chicago, someone puts red paint all over a statue depicting the Native American mascot of the Blackhawks hockey team. Vandals write “LAND BACK” and “DECOLONIZE” at the statue’s base.
\n\nIn Vallejo, California, vandals destroy a police memorial.
\n\nVandals in Ridley Township, Pennsylvania dump detergent into a police memorial fountain. Hey, everybody starts somewhere.
\n\nTo mark Thanksgiving, protesters and vandals target monuments across the country. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, a monument to pioneers is tagged with “NO THANKS,” “LAND BACK,” “DECOLONIZE,” and “NO MORE GENOCIDE.” People also tear down and tag a statue of George Washington.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/29.jpg\")
Minneapolis, Minnesota, November 26.
\nIn Chicago, Illinois, vandals throw a rope around a statue of President William McKinley and attach it to a truck. Though the vandals do not succeed in toppling the statue, they write “LAND BACK” on its pedestal.
\n\nIn Portland, rioters smash windows of banks and businesses, tagging “LAND BACK” as they do. In a separate incident, across town in Lone Fir Cemetery, a memorial to the veterans of the Civil, Mexican-American, Spanish-American, and Indian Wars is torn down and covered in red paint.\nIn Spokane, Washington, a statue of Abraham Lincoln is splattered with red paint.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/09/08/30.jpg\")
Spokane, Washington, November 26.
\nIn the course of researching this article, we found reports regarding a number of arrests in which people were accused of taking action against these monuments. However, we have not been able to find much information about the current status of most arrestees. Please direct support to defendants and prisoners!
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/heresysquad/status/1271575980105068547\n\n\n
In 2020 alone, police in the United States shot to death over 1000 people. Without including those choked and beaten to death or run off roads, police killed two to three people a day. ↩
\nIn Washington state, Thurston County Prosecuting Attorney Elizabeth McMullen has declined to press charges against Forest Michael Machala, the far-right gunman who shot and nearly killed a counter-demonstrator during a fascist rally in Olympia on December 12. Machala’s attack was the second far-right shooting in Olympia in seven days. Thurston County Superior Court found probable cause for McMullen to file first-degree assault charges against Machala on December 14—yet she chose not to file them, letting the deadline elapse without doing anything. Machala posted bail shortly after his arrest, while his victim was still in the hospital. The court went on to drop the no-contact order stipulating that he should not approach the victim; in addition to removing protection from the victim, this lays the groundwork for Machala to regain possession of his confiscated AR-15. In refusing to press charges against a known extremist who carried out a widely documented shooting in front of a large number of witnesses, Elizabeth McMullen is inviting fascists to come to Olympia and turn it into a killing field.
\n\nElizabeth McMullen’s decision must be understood as an attack in its own right, no less than the shooting Forest Machala carried out. Permit us to spell out why.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/NDpendentPDX/status/1337882230996144128\n\n\n
At the close of the Trump era, we have become inured to tragedies that would have struck us as outrageous just four years ago. We were shocked on the night Trump was inaugurated when Trump supporters shot a person in Seattle, Washington at an event featuring pro-fascist Milo Yiannopoulos—and we were shocked that the media reported on the “violence” of the demonstrators they attacked rather than the shooting. We were shocked when a fascist intentionally drove a car into a crowd of anti-racist demonstrators seven months later, killing one of them. Today, we are accustomed to such things. Just this year, fascists have killed too many people at demonstrations to list here.
\n\nProsecutors in Washington State want to push this further. They want to see if they can normalize not even charging those who are shooting and killing us. One law for them—another for us.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/wanaziwatch/status/1337998737130409984\n\n\n
On the weekend of December 5, 2020, fascists converged on Olympia to demonstrate in favor of Trump’s belated attempt to steal the election. Concerned that they would carry out attacks of the sort that fascists have repeatedly perpetrated around the Pacific Northwest, Olympia locals organized a counterdemonstration. Clashes erupted; fascists triumphantly posted footage of themselves charging, attacking, and beating people. After one conflict, a Trump supporter from Port Orchard named Christopher Michael Guenzler stepped back, raised a gun, and shot a counter-demonstrator, “grazing” the victim’s chest with a bullet. This occurred in front of dozens of witnesses, but it still took the police quite some time to arrest Guenzler—in fact, the police first focused on violently attacking the same counter-demonstrators that the fascists had just attacked. In the end, police questioned Guenzler, and when he lied to them about the shooting, they arrested him and charged him with first-degree assault while armed with a deadly weapon. His bail was set at $50,000.
\n\nOne week later, on December 12, many of the same fascists once again descended upon Olympia. Once again, violent clashes erupted between them and counter-demonstrators seeking to defend against the same attackers that had shot someone the previous weekend. At one point, a fascist drew his gun and advanced on the counter-protesters. He was subsequently arrested before he shot anyone.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/WANaziWatch/status/1337872591629942786\n\n\n
Nonetheless, video footage from December 12 shows police forming a line at the front of the fascist demonstration and firing impact munitions at counter-demonstrators while fascists cheered them on, chanting “fuck antifa.” Some still consider it hyperbolic to refer to violent pro-Trump demonstrators as fascists, but this label seems apt enough when they identify themselves chiefly on the basis of their shared desire to attack those who oppose fascism. If that’s not enough, at least one participant in the demonstration—who has been identified as a well-known neo-Nazi—was captured on video shouting anti-Semitic abuse at counter-demonstrators, with the support of the other fascists present.
\n\nAs they say in the South, cops and the Klan go hand in hand.
\n\nAt the end of the afternoon, Forest Michael Machala opened fire with his handgun, shooting a counter-demonstrator in the back. Machala currently lives in Bellingham. He can be seen in the video footage, wearing gloves and shooting glasses, prepared to imitate the example set by Christopher Guenzler.
\n\nVideo footage from Olympia, December 12. The shooting takes place at 3:21.
\nThe charging documents state that Machala was arrested with a Glock handgun and two ten-round magazines. His Glock had a round in the chamber and seven rounds left in the magazine. Police found a single unfired round matching his bullets on the ground near the spot he was seen racking his gun in the video. Three different video angles capture Machala holding his gun immediately after the shot was fired. He was identified in the video and by witnesses as the shooter.
\n\nProsecutors had already cited this evidence in the course of proving probable cause to the court. Yet they waited out the deadline to file charges, sending their “community engagement specialist” Jessie Knudsen to claim that they lacked sufficient evidence to proceed with charging Machala.
\n\nIn so doing, they passed responsibility back to the Washington State Patrol to provide more evidence in the case. The Washington State Patrol themselves are hardly unbiased. Indeed, immediately after the shooting took place, Washington State Patrol officers once again attacked the same counter-demonstrators that Machala had just attacked, shooting impact munitions and chemical weapons at them, while at the same time providing medical care and support to Machala’s compatriots. It really could not be clearer that the prosecutor, the police, and the fascists are united in a single front.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Johnnthelefty/status/1337935692119244800\n\n\n
The reality is that the prosecutors could have brought half a dozen different charges against Machala in addition to first-degree assault. If they wanted to prosecute him, they would have filed all the charges and tried to intimidate him into taking a plea—this is the strategy they routinely employ against anti-Trump protesters, poor people, and people of color in general. They obviously intend to avoid prosecuting him altogether. Machala’s attorney has stated that he will argue self-defense if Machala is charged—a tacit admission that Machala was, indeed the shooter. Self-defense claims are almost always decided by a jury, not by a prosecutor refusing to bring charges.
\n\nIf anti-fascists had begun shooting at either of these demonstrations, the police would likely have shot them immediately. The police always face towards anti-fascists at these events and inflict the vast majority of their violence upon them. The relatively restrained police response to this week’s far-right invasion of a government building in Salem, Oregon confirms this.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/45thabsurdist/status/1341501865461084160\n\n\n
Let’s compare this to other local precedents.
\n\nJon Tunheim, the elected county prosecutor who likely calls the shots behind Elizabeth McMullen’s decision, is in fact a Democrat. But when Olympia police officer Ryan Donald shot two young Black men, André Thompson and Bryson Chaplin, in 2015, claiming that they attacked him with a skateboard, Tunheim pressed assault charges against both of them.
\n\nA cop shoots two young Black men and the county prosecutor presses charges against them when one of them is permanently paralyzed from the waist down and the officer is unharmed. A white fascist shoots a Black man in the back and receives no charges. This could be the antebellum South.
\n\nThe shooting on December 12 took place less than seven miles from the street where police and federal marshals urged on by Trump extrajudicially murdered Portlander Michael Reinoehl to punish him for shooting an armed fascist who was in the process of attacking him. Afterwards, in a series of speeches around the country, Trump explicitly congratulated and praised the police for carrying out this murder.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1305331160935956481\n\n\n
Trump has pardoned 49 people in the past two days, including four Blackwater mercenaries who ambushed Iraqi civilians with unprovoked gunfire—murdering 14 people and injuring 17 more. As we saw in Ferguson in 2014 and more recently all around the country in the repression of Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the tactics and technologies that soldiers and mercenaries test out overseas are later employed in the United States against US citizens. With these pardons, Trump is showing that the laws that apply to poor people, people of color, and protesters do not apply to his supporters—but he is also seeking to curry favor with actual mercenaries with blood on their hands, in order to lay the groundwork for a future in which they can murder US citizens professionally.
\n\nBiden’s electoral victory has done nothing to curtail the escalating violence of the far right. It has only emboldened them, while at the same time giving liberals an excuse to leave the most vulnerable sectors of the population to face their violence alone.
\n\nIt is certain that fascists in the Pacific Northwest—who have already killed several people in the past few years—will interpret Elizabeth McMullen’s decision to dismiss the charges as permission to shoot anti-fascists, provided they stage the shootings as acts of self-defense. Surely they are discussing how to accomplish this right now. When they do so, the blood will be on her hands.
\n\nWith deeds rather than words, Elizabeth McMullen has announced to fascists around the United States that they can shoot people in the back with impunity. In effect, she is inviting fascists to converge on Olympia to carry out lethal attacks every weekend. Alongside Donald Trump, she is showing everyone that the law is not, as liberals foolishly believe, a measure for the sake of the public good that applies equally to all citizens. On the contrary, it is a weapon in the hands of racist authoritarians, just like the guns in the hands of fascists and police officers. She is doing her part to speed the coming of the day when blood will flow regularly in the streets of her own town. Presumably, she takes it for granted that her own blood will never pour into the sewers of America, mingled with the blood of those whose slaughter she is doing her best to facilitate.
\n\nBut once such a cycle of violence gets underway, it’s hard to know where it will end.
\n\nProsecuting Attorney’s Office: (360) 786-5540
\n\nThe State of Washington v. Forest Machala case file is #20-1-01506-34.
\n\nDonations to the survivor of this shooting can be sent via CashApp to $UnlimitedHands or Venmo to @UnlimitedHands.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/12/07/uprising-counterinsurgency-and-civil-war-understanding-the-rise-of-the-paramilitary-right", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/12/07/uprising-counterinsurgency-and-civil-war-understanding-the-rise-of-the-paramilitary-right", "title": "Uprising, Counterinsurgency, and Civil War : Understanding the Rise of the Paramilitary Right", "summary": "Understanding the rise of the paramilitary right alongside liberal counterinsurgency strategies—and the roles that both play in protecting the state. ", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/header.jpg", "date_published": "2020-12-07T20:44:08Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:47Z", "tags": [ "Trump", "fascism", "racism", "far right", "conspiracy theory" ], "content_html": "In this analysis, Tom Nomad presents an account of the rise of the contemporary far right, tracing the emergence of a worldview based in conspiracy theories and white grievance politics and scrutinizing the function that it serves protecting the state. Along the way, he describes how liberal counterinsurgency strategies function alongside the heavy-handed “law and order” strategies, concluding with a discussion of what the far right mean by civil war.
\n\nTom Nomad is an organizer based in the Rust Belt and the author of The Master’s Tools: Warfare and Insurgent Possibility and Toward an Army of Ghosts.
\n\nThe bulk of this text was composed in September and October 2020, when the George Floyd uprising was still unfolding and many people feared that Trump would try to hold on to the presidency by any means necessary. Since then, the uprising has lost momentum and the Trump administration has failed to organize a seizure of power.
\n\nYet the dynamics described herein persist. The uprising remains latent, waiting to re-emerge onto the streets, while the formation of a new MAGA coalition is underway. Since the election, a constellation including the pro-Trump right, conspiracy theorists, the remnants of the alt-right, and traditional white nationalist groups has formed around a belated attempt to keep Trump in power.
\n\nThis coalition is motivated by conspiracy theories and narratives about Democrats “stealing” the election. An additional segment of the American voting population has connected with the far right, openly calling for their opponents to be eliminated by violent means. This is not just a new right-wing coalition, but a force with the ability to leverage AM radio, cable news, and elected officials to spread racism, xenophobia, and weaponized disinformation.
\n\nTrump and his supporters will be removed from office shortly, but this coalition will persist for years to come. While centrist media outlets described Trump as seeking to seize power, his supporters see themselves as acting to defend the “real” America. In response to Trump’s removal from power, they aim to work with the “loyal” elements of the state—chiefly right-wing politicians and police—to eliminate what they consider an internal threat to the US political project. At its foundation, the right remains a force of counterinsurgency.
\n\nThe events of the George Floyd uprising represent something fundamentally different from the convulsions of the preceding twenty years. The normalities of activism, the structures of discursive engagement premised on dialogue with the state, gave way; their hegemony over political action began to crumble before our eyes. The mass mobilizations—with their staid, boring formats, their pacifist actions with no plan for escalation, their constant repetition of the same faces in the same groups—were replaced by a young, radical crowd largely comprised of people of color, willing not only to challenge the state, but also to fight back. Over a period of months, the previous barriers of political identity evaporated—the constructs that distinguished “activism” from “normal life.” This new force ripped open the streets themselves, leaving the shells of burned police cars in its wake.
\n\nFor some of us, this was a long time coming. The global influence of the US has been in decline since the end of the Cold War; the post-political era that Fukuyama and Clinton proclaimed so confidently has given way to a history that continues to unfold unstoppably. The war that the police wage against us every day finally became a struggle with more than one antagonist. The long anticipated uprising, the moment of reckoning with the bloody past of the American political project, seemed to be at hand. We saw the state beginning to fray at the edges, losing its capacity to maintain control. While we cannot yet see a light at the end, we have at least finally entered the tunnel—the trajectory that will lead us towards the conflicts that will prove decisive.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/1.jpg\")
The uprising in response to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020.
\nBut, just as quickly as this new momentum emerged, we were immediately beset on all sides by the forces of counterinsurgency. The logic of the revolt is constantly under attack, sometimes by those we had counted as allies. Some insist that we must present clear reformist demands, while others aim simply to eliminate us. All the techniques at the disposal of the state and its attendant political classes—including those within the so-called movement—are engaged as our adversaries endeavor to capture the energy of the struggle or exploit it for their own gain.
\n\nFrom the first days, liberal organizers played a core role in this attempt to bring the revolt back within the structures of governance. Caught off guard, they immediately began a campaign to delegitimize the violence expressed in the streets by framing it as the work of provocateurs and “outside agitators.” They progressed to trying to capture the momentum and discourse of the movement, forcing the discussion about how to destroy the police back into a discussion about budgets and electoral politics. Now, as Joe Biden gets his footing, liberals have completed this trajectory, arguing that rioting is not a form of “protest” and that the full weight of the state should be brought to bear on those who stepped outside of the limits of state-mediated politics.
\n\nThe truth is that the revolts of 2020 represent a direct response to the failures of former attempts at liberal capture. During the uprisings of 2014 and 2015, liberals were able to seize control and force the discussion back to the subject of police reform. Consent decrees were implemented across the country; so-called community policing (a euphemism for using the community to assist the police in attacking it) and promises of legislative reform effectively drove a wedge between militants and activists. These attempts delayed the inevitable explosions that we have witnessed since the murder of George Floyd, but they were stopgap measures bound to fail. The current revolt confirms that reformism has not addressed the problem of policing. The areas of the country that have seen the most violent clashes are almost all cities run by Democrats, in which reform was tried and failed. In some ways, the narrative advanced by the Trump campaign that cities are in revolt due to Democratic administrations is true—but it is not as a consequence of their permissiveness, but rather of the failure of their attempt to co-opt the energy of revolt.
\n\nAt the same time, we are experiencing a new attempt to supplement state forces with the forces of the far right. Militia groups that previously claimed to be opposed to government repression are now mobilizing their own informal counterinsurgency campaigns. This is not surprising, given that these militias were always grounded in preserving white supremacy. It is also unsurprising that more traditional Republicans have allowed themselves to be pulled in this direction—ever since September 11, 2001, their entire ethos has been built around the idea that they are the only people willing to defend the “homeland” from outside threats.
\n\nYet it is surprising the lengths to which the state is willing to go to accomplish this goal. Traditionally, the basis of the state has been a set of logistical forces able to impose the will of a sovereign; in America, that sovereign is liberal democracy itself. The continuation of this project is directly tied to the state’s ability to function in space, logistically and tactically; this requires spaces to be “smooth,” predictable, and without resistance or escalation, both of which can cause contingent effects that disrupt state actors’ ability to predict dynamics and deploy accordingly. In calling for para-state forces to confront the forces of revolt in the street, Trump and his colleagues are setting the stage for a conflagration that—if all sides embrace it—could lead to large-scale social conflict. Their willingness to embrace such a risky strategy suggests how near the state has been pushed to losing control. It also indicates the ways that they are willing to modify their counterinsurgency strategy.
\n\nThe revolt is now under siege. The official state forces—the police, federal forces, National Guard, and the like—are employing a strategy of consistent escalation, which functions both as retaliation and repression. The forces of liberal capture have showed which side they are on, affirming Biden’s promise to crush the militant sectors of the uprising and reward the moderate elements. The forces of the right have received approval to generalize the “strategy of tension” approach that they developed in Portland in the years since 2016. When these newly anointed forces of right-wing reactionary para-militarism are incorporated into an already existing patchwork of counterinsurgency-based approaches, the scene is set for a scenario that can only end in mass repression or mass resistance, and likely both.
\n\nThe emergence of these converging counterinsurgency strategies has coincided with a rising discourse of civil war. This is not the sort of civil war discussed in texts like Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War, which describes, in hyperbolic terms, a conflict between different “forms of life.” Civil war, as understood in the modern US context, is a widespread frontal conflict between social forces that involves the participation of the state but also takes place apart from it. The idea that this could somehow resolve the core social and political differences emerges from a millenarian vision structured around American civilian militarization, which has emerged in response to the so-called “War on Terrorism,” the realities of social division within the US, and the rising perception of threats, whether real (people of color dealing with the police) or imaginary (“rioters are coming to burn the suburbs”). Though many on all sides embrace this concept, this fundamentally shifts our understandings of strategy, politics, and the conflict itself.
\n\nWe should be cautious about embracing this concept of civil war; we should seek to understand the implications first. The framework of civil war might feel like an accurate way to describe our situation. It can feel cathartic to use this term to describe a situation that has become so tense. But embracing this concept and basing our mode of engagement on it could unleash dynamics that would not only put us in a profoundly disadvantageous situation, tactically speaking, but could also threaten to destroy the gains of the uprising itself.
\n\nBefore we can delve into why this is the case, we must review how the framework itself emerged. To do so, we need to go back to the middle of the 20th century.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/4.jpg\")
In a time of increasing anger and confrontation, Trump’s party seeks to leverage rhetoric about civil war to mobilize an additional line of defense for their vision of the state.
\nTo consider what civil war could mean in contemporary America, we have to understand how we got here. We have to tell the story of how white supremacy shifted from being identical with the functioning of the state itself to become a quality that distinguishes the vigilante from the state, on a formal level, while operating directly in concert with the state. What we are tracing here is not a history, in the sense of a chronicle of past events, but rather a sort of genealogy of concepts and frameworks.
\n\nWe’ll start with the shift in political and social dynamics that took place in the late 1950s and early 1960s in response to the Civil Rights Movement. Resistance to hegemonic white power began to impact two fundamental elements of white American life during this period: the concept of American exceptionalism—the idea that America is a uniquely just expression of universal human values—and the notion of a hegemonic white power structure. This led to a shift in the ways that white, conservative groups viewed the world. They felt their hegemony to be newly under threat, not only in regard to their control of political institutions, but also in ways that could erode their economic and social power.
\n\nPreviously, in many places, police had worked hand in hand with vigilante groups like the KKK to maintain racial apartheid. The day-to-day work of maintaining this political structure was largely carried out by official forces, with the underlying social and economic support of a large part of the white population. For example, during the racist massacre that took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, many of the white assailants were deputized and given weapons by city officials.
\n\nDuring the fight for civil rights in the 1960s, when the role of the state in the enforcement of white supremacy began to shift in some places, many white residents adopted an active rather than passive posture in supporting the racist aspects of the social order. As resistance reached a critical mass, the issue of racial segregation became openly political, rather than unspoken and implicit, with entire political platforms structured around positions regarding it. In response to the challenge to the hegemony of the white apartheid state, the structure of apartheid came to the surface, and white Southerners enlisted in openly racist political forces on a scale not seen since at least the 1930s. These shifts and the subsequent widespread social response created the political and social conditions for the dynamics we see today.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/17.jpg\")
The relationship between Richard Nixon and North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms prefigured Donald Trump’s relationship with today’s outright racists. The poster on the left is from a previous Senate campaign Helms masterminded in 1950.
\nDuring that period, the discourse of white supremacy also changed form. As oppressed populations rose up with increasing militancy, the narrative of unchallenged white supremacy gave way to a new narrative grounded in an idyllic portrayal of white Christian America and a promise to construct racial and economic unity around an effort to regain power and restore the “lost” America. This narrative, articulated by politicians like George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, Pat Buchanan, and later Ronald Reagan (and distilled today in Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”), was not just a call to preserve white supremacy. Rather, it described an ontological conflict in which the attempt to overthrow Jim Crow and bring an end to structural disparities represented a threat not only to an economic and social structure, but also to white America itself. Further, it proposed that this threat necessitated a response employing informal violence, mobilized across a wide swath of society, with the consent of the state. This narrative portrayed the emerging social conflict, not as a conflict about race and politics, but as an existential struggle, a matter of life and death.
\n\nIn some circles, the demand for a political and social unity for white America was framed in terms of “civilization”—this is the current from which the contemporary far right emerged. As Leonard Zeskind argues, this shift involved embracing the concepts of “Western civilization,” the need to defend it, and the incorporation of fascist and Nazi tropes into the thinking of the far right. Many of the personalities who were to drive a militant shift in the far right—David Duke, Willis Carto, William Pierce, and others like them—began to publish newsletters and books, finding a home in the world of gun shows and obscure radio programs. This shift, from white populations taking their political and social domination for granted to white populations reacting to a perceived loss of hegemony, also contributed to the rise of armed right-wing groups. The idea of defending Western civilization provided a moralistic framework and a justification for violence, leading to groups like The Order carrying out armed robberies and assassinations during the 1970s and 1980s.
\n\nIn more mainstream Republican circles, these ideas of the idyllic America and its civilizational superiority became policy positions, though they were expressed only in coded terms. By the time of the 1992 George HW Bush re-election campaign, it was no longer possible to leverage overt racism within polite society the way it had previously been. As a result, the right began to frame this discourse in new terms, speaking of “Western” values and civilization, describing a “real” America defending the world against Communism and disorder, which were implicitly associated with racial and political difference. In place of people like Duke or Wallace articulating overt calls for racial segregation, the right began to use a different discourse to call for separation on the basis of the concepts of purity and deviance and the language of law and order.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/18.jpg\")
\nThis served to define a cultural and political space and also the areas of exclusion—not on the basis of overt concepts of race, but around the idea of a civilizational difference. The terms of division were sometimes framed through the lens of religious differences, other times through the lens of a gulf between a rural and an “urban” America. Some within the right at this time, like Lee Atwater, discussed this shift overtly with their supporters (though behind closed doors), articulating how “dog whistle” policies on tax, housing, and crime could serve as replacements for the overt racism of the past. This concept of a Western civilization under threat fused with the fervor against “communism” that was revived under Reagan in the 1980s, along with rising conspiracy theory discourse—a toxic mixture that would explode, literally and figuratively, in the late 1980s.
\n\nMeanwhile, the rise of the religious right as a political force added another element to this fusion of conspiracy theories, anti-communist paranoia, and the increasingly armed politics of white grievance. Prior to the Reagan campaign in 1980, the religious right had largely approached politics with suspicion, with some pastors telling their parishioners not to participate in a political system that was dirty and sinful. The Reagan campaign intentionally reached out to this segment of the population, shifting its campaign rhetoric to attract their support and elevating their concerns into the realm of policy. Consequently, anti-choice campaigns and the like became a powerful means to mobilize people. This gave the narrative of social polarization an additional moral and religious angle, using rhetoric about sin and preventing “depravity.” The result was an escalation into armed violence, with the Army of God murdering doctors and bombing abortion clinics around the US.
\n\nIn this move toward armed violence, right-wing terrorist discourse underwent a few modifications. The first of these was an expansion of the terrain where they saw the “war” being fought. The tendency towards armed violence expanded from focusing on civil rights initiatives and the question of whether marginalized groups should be able to participate in society to sectors that had traditionally considered themselves distinct from overt fascism. As the mainstream right increasingly embraced the concept of the culture wars, they also adopted the implication that there was a fundamental existential conflict. By framing the conflict in terms of purity and deviance, coupled with the idea of civilizational conflict that was already emerging in the right, the construction of an absolute social division around political power came to justify a rising discourse of armed politics. Right-wing attention was concentrated on those who did not share right-wing moral codes; this was framed as a justification to use state violence (in the form of legal restrictions, such as abortion bans) and armed force (in the form of far-right terrorism) to eliminate all groups perceived as threats to moral American life.
\n\nIn addition to targeting people who were pro-choice, who had different religious affiliations, or who expressed themselves outside of the cis-hetero normative construct, these perceived threats were also directed at non-white people, though this was framed in the language of responding to social and political deviance. The idea of an armed cultural conflict, the targets of which now included everyone outside of white Christian conservatism, began to spread throughout the right wing, as some of the more moderate factions embraced or at least explained away anti-choice violence or the formation of militia groups. However, as the violence became a more significant political liability, conservative politicians began to modify the extremist rhetoric of armed factions into policy, embracing the culture of these political circles while rejecting armed violence, at least in public. This was evident in anti-choice politics, in which politicians embraced groups like Right to Life but rejected groups like the Army of God even as they incorporated their political rhetoric into policy.
\n\nThe development of this broad political identity based in white Christianity and the attempt to restore and protect an idyllic America from all “outside forces” brought the discourse of far-right organizations into increasingly mainstream contexts starting in the early 1990s. However, while their ideas were becoming more and more generalized, armed far-right groups became increasingly isolated, especially as the Gulf War precipitated rising mainstream patriotism. As allegiance to the state became a default politics on the right, armed violence was increasingly seen as fringe terrorism. In some ways, during this period, the right no longer needed the armed groups, since it held almost unchallenged power, and could implement far-right visions incrementally through policy.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/16.jpg\")
\nDuring this period of right-wing ascendancy and lasting until the election of Clinton in 1992, the armed far right became publicly ostracized from the mainstream right, which increasingly saw the indiscretion of the far-right as a liability. Increasingly marginalized, far-right fringe elements kept to themselves, breeding an ecosystem of conspiracy theories dispersed via newsletters, pamphlets, books, and radio. However, with the rise of the Clinton administration and the loss of Republican power in Congress, far-right beliefs were slowly reintegrated into the mainstream right. Publications like American Spectator magazine picked up fringe conspiracy theories from the far right about the Clintons’ financial dealings, the deaths of their former friends and business associates, and Bill Clinton’s supposed ties to moderate left-wing activists during the Vietnam War (never mind that he was an informant while at Oxford). This process accelerated after the government raids at Waco, which were portrayed by many on the right as an attack against a religious community over gun ownership issues, and at Ruby Ridge, portrayed as a state assault on a rural family minding their own business.
\n\nThe events that played out at Waco and Ruby Ridge, early in the Clinton administration, began to play a role of being points of condensation around which conspiracy theories could form. The efforts to establish global unity under American political norms, which arose at the end of the Cold War, accelerated the emergence of narratives about a purported New World Order—a superficially modified version of some of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that the Nazis had previously advanced. Combined with the narrative of an absolute cultural and political division, this fueled perceptions that the “traditional” America that the right wing held up as an ideal was collapsing. Elements of the racist far-right used these conspiracy theories as openings to enter mainstream right wing circles. Mainstream Republican discourse integrated the former fringes—a move propelled by Newt Gingrich and Thomas DeLay for the purposes of creating a permanent Republican voting block; by pushing the narrative of permanent division and existential threat, they could demonize the Democrats, guaranteeing loyalty among their voters. The popularization of these narratives extended the Overton window to the right in ways that the far-right subsequently exploited to extend its influence and recruitment. Many of these tendencies fuel present-day Trumpism.
\n\nConcurrently, in the 1990s, militia movements that had previously been viewed as fringe elements increasingly came to be regarded as necessary to defend America from internal and external enemies. As right-wing conspiracy theories reached a fever pitch and increasingly mainstream Republicans embraced these politics, the militias grew in size. This tendency, coupled with the right’s historic fervor for gun culture, popularized the notion of the “patriot” standing up against “tyranny” to preserve “freedom” and an American (read: white-dominated) way of life. This language was continuously weaponized over the following decades, pulling more moderate conservatives into contact with extreme right-wing ideas, which became less and less divergent from the language of mainstream Republican activists.
\n\nUnderstandings of “freedom” as the preservation of white domination and Christian supremacy continued to infiltrate the mainstream right, fueled by the conspiracy theories about how Clinton was going to destroy the white Christian way of life in America. In this mutation, the concept of “freedom” was modified to represent a rigid set of social norms. For example, Christian groups began to declare that it was a violation of their “freedom” for the state to allow non-hetero couples to marry, or not to force children to pray in school. In the past 30 years, this dynamic has been repeatedly applied to exclude people from society based on sexual orientation or gender identity and to further integrate the language of Christianity into government documents. This notion of “freedom” as the “preservation” of a “way of life” has become so popular with the right-wing that it barely requires repeating when politicians employ it to push policies of exclusion. Combined with the desire to eliminate difference and to preserve social and political inequality, disempowerment, and racial apartheid, the notion of “freedom” has been stripped of any actual meaning. This has set the stage for an increasingly authoritarian posture across the right.
\n\nThe concept of a culture war, which had become common parlance within the religious right, fused with the widespread conspiracy theory narrative describing the rise of a tyrannical elite. In its attempts to undercut Clinton, the Republican Party created the conditions for a concept of total cultural warfare, which became increasingly militarized and seeped back into the more moderate factions of the Republican Party. Some of these factions still embraced policy-centric positions, but the narratives they utilized to motivate voters were all based on this notion of an absolute cultural threat. Voters were presented en masse with the image of an American culture threatened with extinction, led to believe that they were the only forces that could mobilize against a tyrannical “liberal elite” in order to preserve their “freedom.” As this mentality generalized, the idea of civil war as a horizontal conflict between social factions came to be widely accepted among the right.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/9.jpg\")
For the far right, “freedom” is understood as the right to perpetuate a way of life based in white domination and Christian supremacy.
\nWith the advent of the second Bush administration and the September 11 attacks, the relationship between the state and the fringe far right changed dramatically. The state’s response focused on constructing a national consensus around the “War on Terrorism”—a consensus which was exploited to justify systematic violations of civil liberties, to target entire communities, and to channel trillions into overseas military occupations. The core of this campaign was the construction of a narrative of two elements in conflict (“with us or against us”)—a binary distinction grounded in unquestioning loyalty to the state—and the drafting of the “public” into the intelligence and counter-terrorism apparatuses. The attacks themselves and the rhetoric around them helped to popularize the concept of a conflict of civilizations; the idea of defending the “homeland” from foreign threats that sought to “destroy the American way of life” was increasingly adopted across the American political landscape. A sort of renaissance occurred in the militia movement: no longer alienated from the state, the militia movement started to become a cultural phenomenon. The concept of the citizen defender of the “homeland” entered popular culture, becoming a widespread cultural archetype within mainstream conservatism.
\n\nThe embrace of the tenets that formed the foundations of the militia movement in the decade leading up to September 11 had profound effects.
\n\nFirst, an ecosystem of conspiracy theories developed around September 11, propelling Alex Jones from the fringe towards mainstream conservative circles. This was bolstered by state efforts to spread the narrative that hidden enemies within the US were waiting for a time to attack. This posture lends itself to justifying social exclusion and validating conspiracy theories; the threat is not apparent but hidden, associated with elements of society that diverge from supposed social norms. As a result, the narrative on the far-right shifted from a framework that was at odds with the state to a framework in which the right targeted others based on race, religion, and politics in order to defend the state itself. Conspiracy theorists were able to exploit increasing Internet use, using online media and the newly formed mass social media platforms—chiefly Facebook—to spread conspiracy theories to new social circles.
\n\nSecond, the incorporation of far-right ideas and personalities into mainstream conservative discourse brought more traditional conservatives into increasingly close contact with extreme racism and Islamophobia. Before the rise of social media and the right-wing idea of the civilian soldier, many people saw these conspiracy theories as marginal and lacking credibility, or else did not encounter them in the first place. But now, these fringe elements gained an audience within more mainstream circles, hiding their intentions within the parlance of counter-terrorism. As the field of counter-terrorism studies emerged, many of those who initially populated that world hailed from the Islamophobic far right; they were able to pass themselves off as “terrorism experts” simply by presenting themselves as a “think tank” and making business cards. As the right came to adopt the concept of an absolute threat and to identify that threat with otherness in general, the fear of an immediate terrorist threat that politicians had propagated bled over into cultural and political divisions, conveying the sense that the enemy represented an immediate and physical threat to health and safety. The more this mentality spread throughout the right, and the more that this was leveraged to demonize difference, the more the conditions were created for these divisions to be characterized with a narrative of overt warfare.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/8.jpg\")
For more and more Republicans, inclusion in society has once again become conditional, depending on political beliefs; protest activity itself is enough to identify a person as an external enemy. This is ironic, insofar as the right wing has also dishonestly sought to rebrand itself as defending free speech.
\nWithin the right, as the idea of a militarized defense of the state against enemies both internal and external took shape, the definition of “enemy” expanded to include not just those of different cultural, ethnic, or religious backgrounds, but also immigrants, Muslims, and “liberals.” As the Bush era wore on, this newly empowered militia movement, increasingly aligned with the white nationalist agenda, began to engage in semi-sanctioned activity, such as the Minutemen patrols along the Mexican border. Republican politicians incorporated the ideals of these militarized groups into GOP policy, both nationally and locally in places like Arizona, where white nationalists played critical roles in drafting SB1070, and later helped to popularize a narrative about the need for a border wall. Following the patterns of past social conflicts, this narrative served to create political conditions that could render increasingly invasive state policies more acceptable and successful—including the expansion of the surveillance state, the militarization of the police, and the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.
\n\nAs militarism took hold on the right, the foundations of the contemporary conservative position were laid. The right came to see themselves as defenders of the state, and the state as the force that defends their “freedom”—understanding “freedom” as the preservation of a white Christian conservative society. Consequently, formerly anti-government militias shifted to openly supporting repressive government intervention, and even the supposedly “libertarian” elements of the right embraced the police and the forces of the state.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/15.jpg\")
Christianity, militarism, and the ruling class—an unholy alliance.
\nWhen Obama took office, the stage was set for the final act, in which the politics of white grievance, the violent preservation of white supremacy, and what would become a state strategy of counterinsurgency came together in a volatile cocktail. Just as they had during the Clinton era, Republican politicians began to capitalize on racism and conspiracy theories as political strategies to regain power—but this time, these conspiracy theories took on overtly racial and religious tones. What had been implicit in the 1990s was now explicit.
\n\nThe prevalence of conspiracy theories within the Republican Party reinforced the notion of a “real America” protecting the state from internal enemies—which, according to this narrative, had managed to take control of the state itself in the form of the Obama administration. The necessity of portraying the threat as Other, external to a “real America,” is obvious enough in the rise of the \n“birther” conspiracy. The right merged everything they opposed into a singular force attempting to destroy America: recall the infamous Glenn Beck conspiracy board, according to which the Service Employees International Union was selling copies of The Coming Insurrection to help Obama institute Islamo-Fascist Leninism. This completed the process via which the right had begun to view all who disagreed with their doctrines as the enemy and to consider themselves a distinct political project based around the defense of America.
\n\nParanoia took over in the mainstream right. All sources of information that did not reinforce their views, all policies that could be portrayed as part of a “liberal conspiracy,” all efforts to promote social tolerance were seen as direct attacks against America itself. The conspiratorial tendency that Republicans had incorporated into the party in the late 1990s had metastasized into a belief that Republicans were constantly under assault by enemies that must be destroyed. The entirety of society and politics were viewed as the terrain of an ongoing civil war, conceptualized in increasingly millenarian terms. To those outside the right, this narrative seemed completely divorced from reality—but within these circles, these theories were the result of years of social polarization and burgeoning ideas about cultural warfare, promoted by Republican politicians. Departing from the idea of a lifestyle under threat, moving through the concept of cultural warfare into conspiracy theories and the framework of civilizational warfare, an overtly racist call to “protect Western civilization” became the cornerstone of contemporary right wing politics.
\n\nThe open embracing of conspiracy theory generated several mutations within right-wing discourse, two of which became prominent.
\n\nThe first mutation took the form of the Tea Party and the birther conspiracy—from which Donald Trump’s candidacy ultimately emerged. In these circles, conspiracy theories fueled by Facebook and online right-wing platforms spread at an unprecedented pace, generating theories about everything from “death panels” to undocumented immigration and eventually culminating in QAnon. The rapid pace at which these theories proliferated and were adopted by the Republican Party and their attendant media organizations, such as Fox News, created the conditions for these narratives to grow increasingly divergent from demonstrable and observable fact. In these circles, the acceptance of information had less to do with its veracity than with the declared politics of the communicator. This backlash against “liberal media”—i.e., any media organization that did not valorize right-wing narratives—formed the basis of the “fake news” narrative later pushed by Trump.
\n\nThe second mutation was the emergence of newly empowered militia and white nationalist movements, which had come to exist in close proximity with one another twenty years earlier when they were relatively isolated during the Clinton era. These organizations capitalized on their newfound access to people in positions of power. Narratives about defending the state against “outsiders” continued to spread online, enabling militia groups to capitalize on populist discontent in the waning years of the Obama administration. These elements began to organize through several different channels, including attempts to carry out attacks against immigrants and Muslims, the emergence of “citizen’s militias” in places like Ferguson, Missouri in response to the uprising against racist police violence, and direct standoffs with state forces such as the one at the Bundy Ranch in 2014. These confrontations provided a point of condensation, while right-wing media pointed to them as examples of “resistance” to the supposed internal threat.
\n\nConcurrent with the acceleration of activity within conspiracy theory and militia circles was the rise of the “Alt-Right,” which emerged during “Gamer Gate” in 2014. Largely driven by the Internet and misogynist white grievance, this element introduced a new and well-funded influence into the right-wing ecosystem. The Alt-Right is rooted in the white-collar racist right-wing, populated by figures like Jared Taylor and Peter Brimlow who were often seen as soft and bourgeois by other elements of the far-right. Taylor, Brimlow, and similar figures are situated in the universities and think tanks of Washington, DC; they had always operated in a space between the official Republican Party and the Nazi skinheads and racist militias that had dominated the far-right fringe for decades. Flush with cash from tech and financial industry funders and armed with a logic of strategic deception, the Alt-Right gained widespread attention through online harassment campaigns, which they justified by disingenuously leveraging the rhetoric of free speech. Thanks to the developments of the preceding years, the Alt-Right was able to traffic openly in conspiracy theories and disinformation while portraying anyone who opposed them as part of the “liberal establishment”—the groups that the right had convinced their adherents represented an internal threat.
\n\nAs the online presence of the Alt-Right grew, they gained entry into influential Republican circles by teaming up with older, more traditional racist conservatives who had attained positions from which they could shape policy. This influence was amplified by publications like Breitbart, run by Trump’s confidant Steve Bannon, and funded by the Mercer family, who made billions running hedge funds. For Republicans like the Mercers, embracing the Alt-Right was a strategy to gain power within conservative circles and overcome the power networks of more traditional funders like the Koch brothers. Others recognized the power that they could wield by tapping into the online forces assembling around the Alt-Right. This online presence was supplemented by the mobilization of older conservatives through the Tea Party, rising far-right activist energy, and the construction of a culture around the militia movement.
\n\nMany conservative politicians began to embrace this new formation, despite its outright racism and the ways it used confrontational tactics to achieve its goals. In many ways, as with Gingrich and DeLay in past decades, Republican politicians saw this new element of the right wing as a possible source from which they could draw grassroots energy. They hoped to use this energy to compensate for the fact that the Republican Party was becoming a minoritarian party with a voter base that was slowly dying out—just as they used gerrymandering and voter suppression to counteract this disadvantage. They saw an opportunity to construct a voting block that was completely loyal to them and isolated from any other perspectives, beginning with the demonization of the “liberal media” and eventually encompassing every aspect of everyday life—where people buy food and clothes, what kind of cars they drive, the music they listen to, the books they read. The social “bubble” that the right had spent years building crystalized, enabling them to mobilize rage and reactionary anger almost at will. Though this allowed the Republicans to leverage parliamentary procedure to limit much of the Obama agenda, it also created the conditions that led to the old guard of the party losing control over the party itself.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/6.jpg\")
In the new iteration of the Republican Party, hatred is understood as good business.
\nOut of this moment arose Donald Trump, who ran a campaign that was as openly racist as it was nationalistic, as blatantly grounded in disinformation as it was in a politics of social division and white grievance. Even though his candidacy was openly rejected by traditional Republican power circles, they quickly came to understand that their attempts to build a grassroots conservativism had caused them to lose control over the force that they had helped call into being. The Overton Window in the US had shifted so far right by this point that the politics of Pat Buchanan, which the Republican base of the 1990s had rejected as racist, were now firmly entrenched as core Republican beliefs. The Trump campaign set about tearing down the remaining elements of the right that resisted his overt politics of racial division; in the process, it empowered the overtly racist elements within the right that had been gaining influence for years. Many commentators attributed this shift to the rise of the Alt-Right and its internet disinformation and trolling campaigns. In fact, the stage had been set for Trump long before, when the narrative of white communities at risk of destruction gained currency in the years following the Civil Rights Movement.
\n\nThanks to the overt articulation of racist politics, the isolation of the right in a media bubble, and the construction of an absolute conflict between the right and all other political and social groups, the Trump campaign found a ready group of supporters. This mobilization invoked the idea of being under attack by “others,” but it also invited this base to serve as a force in offensive street action. The forces of militarization and social polarization that had been gaining ground on the right for years were unleashed in the street. All around the US, Trump supporters attacked immigrants, vandalized stores and places of worship, carried out mass shootings in the name of ethnic cleansing, and organized rallies and marches during which participants often attacked everyone from organized opposition to random passersby.
\n\nThis mobilization enabled Trump not only to win the nomination and the presidency, but to marginalize practically all other factions of the Republican Party. This, in turn, created a situation in which normal conservatives were willing to consider taking on counterinsurgency roles on behalf of the state to defend the “homeland” against opposition to Trump, who has become synonymous with the rise of the white Christian “true America” to power.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/10.jpg\")
Neo-Nazis and members of the Alt-Right mingling at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017.
\nThis popularization of formerly fringe ideas has been widespread and terrifying. On the level of society, this manifests as a sort of cultural warfare, instilling inescapable and constant fear: immigrants fear being rounded up, dissidents fear being targeted by the state or right-wing vigilantes, targeted groups fear discrimination and police racism. Over the past four years, elements of the overtly racist right have openly mobilized in the streets, causing a massive social crisis—yet this has also driven elements of the left and left-adjacent circles to mobilize against rising fascist activity, and they have largely succeeded in driving the far right off the streets again, or at least limiting their gains.
\n\nMeanwhile, the Trump administration has not hesitated to use the mechanisms of the state to crack down on dissidents and harass populations considered to threaten the re-establishment of white hegemony, while continuously spreading disinformation to construct a parallel reality. The justification for targeting dissidents is descended directly from the concept of defending “real America” from attack by secretive internal enemies. Narratives that reinforce this portrayal of the scenario are promoted, regardless of verifiability, by an entire universe of right-wing media. Trump has positioned himself and the media outlets that support him as the sole sources of truth for his supporters. Consequently, he has been able to frame any opposition—even simple fact checking—as an attack against himself and his vision of America, separating his adherents from all other sectors of the American public.
\n\nWhat emerged is a sort of final act, a culminating move in the construction of the concept of civil war on the right. The right transformed from a force opposing everyone they considered immoral or un-American, including the state, depending on who was in power, to a force that was completely loyal to the state. In this transformation, the concept of civil war also underwent a fundamental shift from a notion of social or cultural conflict between defined social factions, as it was for the religious right, to a strategy of defending the state against oppositional forces. In this transformation, the concept of civil war acquired a central paradox, in which the term came to mean something wholly other than its initial connotations within right-wing rhetoric. It no longer denotes a conflict that occurs between social factions outside of formal state power; now it describes a conflict in which one political or social faction becomes a force operating alongside the state within a framework of counterinsurgency.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/7.jpg\")
A SWAT sergeant wearing a #QAnon conspiracy-theory patch greets Vice President Mike Pence.
\nThe concept of civil war, in its traditional sense, presumes that there are two or more political factions competing for state power, or else, a horizontal conflict between social factions that are otherwise understood as part of the same larger political or social category. In this framework, the factions that enter into conflict are either doing so directly, with the intention of eliminating each other, or in a situation in which the control of the state is in question, with different factions fighting to gain that control. The horizontality of civil war distinguishes it from concepts like revolution or insurgency, in which people struggle against the state or a similar structure such as a colonial regime or occupying army. To say that a conflict is “horizontal” does not mean that the factions involved wield equal political, economic, or social power—that is almost never the case. Rather, in this sense, “horizontality” is a concept used in the study of insurgencies to describe a conflict as taking place across a society, without necessarily being focused on the logistics or manifestations of the state. In shifting the focus of struggle away from the operational manifestations of the state, this understanding of civil war tends to isolate the terrain of engagement. Rather than centering the struggle in everyday life—in the dynamics of our day-to-day economic and political activities—this understanding of civil war engenders a series of mutations.
\n\nFirst, it forces a sort of calcifying of the way the conflict is understood. Rather than the dynamic, kinetic conflicts that typify contemporary insurgencies, in which conflict manifests as a result of and in relation to everyday life, this way of seeing approaches social divisions as rigid forms. If we begin by assuming the existence of a fundamental social division preceding any questions about contextual political dynamics—as in the concept of cultural warfare embraced by the right—this will cause us to identify both the enemy and our “friends” as permanent and static entities. In this conceptual framework, these identities necessarily precede the conflict—they form the basis of the conflict within the original category of unity—and remain static throughout the conflict, as they are the terms that define the conflict itself. Consequently, partisanship becomes a sort of ideological rigidity in which actions are driven by a purely abstract definition of friendship and enmity.
\n\nThere are clearly elements of the aforementioned “horizontality” in the current uprising and the reaction to it, and concepts of identity have played a key role in the way that the conflict has emerged, but the reality is more complex. If the social struggle that exploded into the streets in 2020 had simply been a conflict between right-wing social and political factions and their anti-fascist opposition, then the characterization of civil war might have been apt, just as it would have been if it were simply a conflict over who controls the state. But the actual scenario is profoundly more frightening than the clashes we have seen in Charlottesville, Berkeley, and Portland since 2016. In 2020, we have seen political factions functioning as para-state forces aligned with the state, working in concert with the police and openly engaging in counterinsurgency measures employing extralegal violence. The state is no longer simply refusing to act in response to violence between fascists and anti-fascists, as it had since 2016. Starting in summer 2020, factions within the state actively began to call these right-wing forces out into the street, while at the same time promoting conspiracy theories to legitimize militias and expand their reach within the moderate right, modifying DHS intelligence reports to justify the violence, and using the Department of Justice as a legal enforcement arm. Between August and November, all this took place in coordination with the messaging of Trump’s reelection campaign.
\n\nThe traditional understanding of civil war implies a conflict between two distinct factions within a wider unity that defines both, as argued by Carl Schmitt. For example, a civil war would be an apt description of an open fight between fascists and anti-fascists over control of the state. The current scenario does not match that narrative. One element of the conflict is openly identifying as an element of the state itself, however unofficially; the perceived legitimacy of the right-wing position derives from their claim to be working in the interests of “America,” even if that involving opposing certain elements of the state. Describing the defense of the state as civil war creates the illusion of a horizontal social conflict, when in fact what we are describing is nothing more than informal policing.
\n\nThis explains how the contemporary right wing embraces the police, soldiers, and murderers like Kyle Rittenhouse in the same breath. They understand themselves as fighting alongside the state to preserve it. It is not just that Trump has leveraged them for this purpose; their entire narrative propels them in this direction, rendering them willing participants in the establishment of authoritarianism under the banner of “freedom.” All the state has to do to mobilize them is to conjure an enemy and legitimize extra-legal action.
\n\nIn calling them forward and sanctioning their actions, the state has employed a strategy with two clear objectives. First, to compensate for the state’s failure or hesitance to mobilize enough force to contain the uprising. Giving leeway to vigilante forces, the state enters a zone of exception that allows for violence not subject to the constraints that ordinarily limit what the state can do by force. Second, to construct the uprising as a threat. Taking advantage of widespread xenophobia, racism, and citizen militia mentality on the right, the state presented the uprising as something outside of America, posing a threat to America. This mentality is clearly confined to one segment of the American population, but that segment is all that is necessary for the operation to succeed.
\n\nFor these moves to be effective, it was necessary to construct a threat that was both outside and internal. The narrative of “outside agitators” was mobilized to delegitimize Black resistance by denying that it ever actually occurred, insinuating that “outside agitators” drove the local rebellions. This narrative has been deployed across the political spectrum, from conservative Republicans to progressive Democrats, in a flagrant attempt to decenter the idea of direct, localized resistance. This served a number of different agendas. In cities governed by Democrats, it enabled local administrations to deny the failures of reformism; in more conservative areas, politicians used it to deny the profound racism at the core of the American project and to preserve the narrative of American exceptionalism. This effort to conceal Black resistance was easily debunked, as arrestee statistics around the country repeatedly showed that the majority of people arrested in local protests were from the immediate area and were hardly all “white anarchists.”
\n\nWhen the falsehood about “outside agitators” collapsed, Trump turned to defining whole cities as outside the realm of American legitimacy. This included threatening local officials, declaring that they had lost control of cities, and ultimately designating those cities as “anarchist jurisdictions.” This successfully mobilized right-wing groups to go into some of these cities and start conflicts, but ultimately, the reach of this ploy was limited. For counterinsurgency to succeed, it needs to employ narratives that are widely accepted—and uncontrolled “anarchist jurisdictions” failed this test. This narrative has been most effective when it focuses specifically on “anarchists,” defining the term as anyone involved in any sort of direct resistance, including marches. By promoting the idea that Americans face a dangerous adversary bent on evil, the Trump administration tried to construct the terms of a horizontal social conflict in which elements of the right could play a direct role in fighting the “anarchists.”
\n\nCalling the militia movement into the streets via a narrative of total conflict shifted the terrain of conflict itself. Where previously, the unrest emerging throughout society was directed at the state, suddenly those in revolt were compelled to contend with two forces, the state and the paramilitaries. In this mobilization of social conflict, the state was able to not only gain force in the streets, often leveraged through threats and direct political violence, but was also able to decenter the focus of resistance away from the state, into the realm of social conflict.
\n\nIn mobilizing paramilitaries, the state both leveraged and incorporated the social polarization of the past decades. This provided the state with a mechanism outside of the structure of law through which repression may take place. In embracing this informal force, the state adopted a strategy similar to the approach seen in Egypt and then Syria during the so-called Arab Spring, in which reactionary social forces were mobilized to attack uprisings.
\n\nWhen this took place in Egypt in 2011, the rebels in the streets did not allow this strategem to divert them from focusing on bringing down the Mubarak regime. But in Syria, the introduction of paramilitaries into the conflict not only hampered the uprising from focusing on the state, but also restructured the conflict along ethnic and religious lines, diverting the uprising into sectarian warfare and enabling the state to ride out the ensuing bloodbath. These scenarios were similar in that forces outside of the state were mobilized for the purpose of counterinsurgency, even if the kinds of force involved were different. As in Egypt and Syria, the struggle in the US could be diverted into sectarian violence. If this takes place, it will be the consequence of a fundamental misunderstanding of how the state functions and what the role of paramilitary forces is.
\n\nThough these situations differ in many ways from the one we find ourselves in, there is one common thread that ties them together. In Egypt, Syria, and in the current American context, the narrative of civil war initially developed specifically in communities that were aligned with the state. These communities conceive of civil war in paradoxical terms. On the one hand, there is a narrative describing a conflict between social factions, a “with us or against us” mentality. On the other hand, these social divisions are drawn along the same lines that define loyalty within the political space. The factions that see themselves as aligned with the state shape their identity largely around some sort of ideological project (such as right-wing Christianity in the US, for example) that they seek to implement through the state, leading them to see all opponents of the state as social enemies. In this framework, the concept of civil war becomes an analogue for a fundamentally different phenomenon, the voluntary involvement of those outside the state in its operations as paramilitary forces.
\n\nSo the question confronting us is not whether to engage in civil war. Rather, the concept of civil war, as popularly understood in the contemporary United States, is a misnomer.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/12.jpg\")
In facing paramilitaries and the state, we are essentially facing one enemy, not two.
\nThe emergence of this paramilitary phenomenon must be understood in the wider context of the development of counterinsurgency strategies as a response to the George Floyd uprising. Counterinsurgency theory is a vast field, emerging from colonial powers’ attempts to maintain imperialism in the wake of World War II. Beginning with British tactics during the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s, the model provided by those attempts to maintain colonial power came to exert profound influence on subsequent military and policing theory. Both “community policing” and the approach that the US military took during the later phase of the occupation of Iraq derive from thinking that originally emerged at that time. The primary goal of contemporary counterinsurgency, at its most basic, is to separate the insurgents from the population, and to enlist, as much as possible, this same population in initiatives to eliminate the insurgency. As French military thinker David Galula wrote in the 1950s, “The population becomes the objective for the counterinsurgent as it was for his enemy.”
\n\nUnlike the traditional understanding of warfare, which assumes a frontal conflict between identifiable, organized forces and the control of territory, counterinsurgency engages at the level of everyday life, where material action is taken and politics occurs. The terrain of the conflict is not space, necessarily, but rather security—the participants seek the ability to contain crisis in a given area, and then to expand that area. This has taken many forms—from the British brutally relocating entire populations to camps and the Americans napalm-bombing Vietnam to the softer approach of buying loyalty seen in the Sons of Iraq program during the Iraq War. However, the core of this approach is always a system that creates incentives for loyalty and negative consequences for disobedience, resistance, and insurgency. As many historians of US policing have pointed out, there is a cycle in which tactics developed in foreign conflicts are integrated into American policing and vice versa. Counterinsurgency is no exception; the earliest domestic appropriations of this approach were used to provide political victories for the moderate elements of political movements in the 1960s, followed by the emergence of so-called “community policing.”
\n\nThe important thing here is to understand how this approach has been modified during the uprising that began in May 2020. In some ways, the response to the George Floyd uprising employed longstanding techniques—for example, the attempt to recuperate moderate elements. In other ways, we have seen a dramatic break with the techniques that the state relied upon until recently. To understand these differences, we can begin by tracing where they originate.
\n\nThe discourse of law and order has formed the foundation of the contemporary prison-industrial complex and the explosive rise in prison populations—paving the way for “broken windows” policing, the militarization of police forces, mandatory minimum sentences, and the expansion of the prison system. This discourse relies on two fundamental elements: the state and the law. Following Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, we can describe the state as a formation through which the will of sovereignty is expressed, with the primary goals being the projection of sovereignty and the continuation of that projection. Within this construction of the state, law exists as an expression of sovereignty—but it is not the only possible expression. The state can suspend law, or supersede law, in an attempt to perpetuate itself.
\n\nWe saw this play out during the George Floyd uprising, as elements of the state abandoned the framework of a police force limited by law, along with the idea that laws against assault, threats, and brandishing weapons apply equally to everyone. Though we often think of the state and law as phenomena that imply each another, the state exceeds the structure of law. When liberal activists wonder why cops appear to be above the law, it is because they literally are. The state is not premised on the construction and maintenance of laws—Stalin’s regime, for example, was often utterly arbitrary. The construction of laws necessitates the existence of the state, but the converse is not true.
\n\nPhilosophically, the structure of law functions to the extent that there cannot be exceptions to the law—in other words, to the degree that the law is enforceable and that there are no moments outside of law. Yet laws—or, to be precise, the dictates of a sovereign structure—do not function simply through declaration; a Bill in Congress is just a piece of paper. Both the law and extra-legal impositions of sovereign will only take force via mechanisms that can impose them upon everyday life. The police are one such mechanism.
\n\nUnderstood thus, law exists as a sort of aspirational totality intended to cover all time and space and to regulate the actions of all citizens. Within this construct, any attack against the police is in some sense an attack upon the state itself. Attacking police, building barricades, and other such disorderly actions all serve to prevent the police from projecting force into an area. Even outside the framework of law, in a state of emergency and in open warfare, the structure of the occupying force and the ability of that force to impose the will of the occupiers functions only to the degree that they can crush resistance within that space. Accordingly, any illegal activity, from unpermitted street marches to open rioting and looting, must be stopped at all costs—otherwise the hegemony of law will degrade, eventually leading to the disorganization of the police and the breakdown of the state.
\n\nThe narrative of “law and order” presents this concept of law as the absolute definition of life and existence. The formal argument in the US political context is that law must apply to all people in the same way all the time, though we all know that this is never the reality and that in fact, the administration itself does not adhere to the law. Under the Trump administration, the state takes the form of a traditional extra-legal sovereignty structure, via which the will of the sovereign imposed through force and law serves as a convenient mechanism to criminalize any form of resistance.
\n\nThis tendency to employ the state as an extra-legal apparatus for imposing sovereignty has manifested itself in a variety of forms—including the argument that people who attack property should spend decades in jail, the use of federal law enforcement to protect buildings from graffiti, and the use of federal charges against protesters, often for actions that local officials would not have deemed worth prosecuting. The goal is clear: to suppress the uprising in its entirety, rather than to regulate or channel its energy. This approach largely failed, often provoking severe reactions in places like Portland, where the presence of federal law enforcement on the streets energized the uprising and inspired some interesting tactical innovations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/3.jpg\")
At its high point, the uprising genuinely threatened the functioning of the capitalist economy, exerting considerable leverage on the ruling class.
\nThe other side of this counterinsurgency puzzle is an emerging form of liberal counterinsurgency. Liberal counterinsurgency is nothing new. We can trace it to the attempt to moderate the labor movement after World War II and subsequent efforts to contain the Civil Rights Movement; the current strategies are familiar from the later days of the Iraq occupation. The fundamental move here is to provide an access point through which elements of a political faction or movement can get involved in the state. Sometimes this is through the mechanism of voting and the channeling of resistance into electoralism. If that fails, or if the crisis is acute enough, the state will attempt to incorporate these moderate elements directly by appointing them to government positions, including them in committees and in the constructing of policy. Arguably, the beneficiaries of previous applications of this technique form the core of the contemporary Democratic Party, which is comprised of the moderate wings of various political initiatives, all of whom were given access to some element of power. The final move in this strategy is to delegitimize or crush the ungovernable elements that refuse to compromise.
\n\nAt its core, liberal counterinsurgency relies on fracturing political initiatives, uprisings, and organizations, sorting the participants into those who can be recuperated and those who must be eliminated. We saw elements of the state and various aspiring state actors employ this strategy in response to the George Floyd uprising. Early on, this took the form of conspiracy theories about outside agitators and agent provocateurs; eventually, it progressed into discourse about the importance of peaceful protest, a focus on defunding the police rather than abolishing them, and calls for people to follow the leadership of community organizers who were attempting to pacify the movement.
\n\nLiberals have attempted to completely reframe what has occurred in the United States since May within the context of acceptable politics. They have worked tirelessly to produce studies showing that the majority of the demonstrations were “peaceful.” They have spoken in the media in support of the uprising, but only mentioning elements adjacent to the uprising who were already associated with the electoral system, such as the various candidates and politicians who got tear gassed for the cameras. They have condemned the actions of the police, but only as violence perpetuated against the “innocent.” The move to glorify peaceful protest implicitly excludes and condemns those who do not fit this narrative of legitimate resistance.
\n\nOnce the most radical elements are delegitimized and excluded, liberals move to criminalize them, even going so far as to justify police force against ”rioters,” often in the same cities where politicians started by condemning police violence. To hear them tell it, legitimate “peaceful” protests were hijacked by violent elements and outside agitators: illegitimate participants undermining the goals of the protests. Those of us who were in the streets at the end of May know that this narrative is absurd—people were fighting back from the moment that the cops shot the first tear gas—yet it has gained favor in liberal circles. This narrative is an attempt to hijack the uprising, to draw what was an ungovernable, uncontrollable element in direct conflict with the state back into electoral discourse.
\n\nRegarding the narrative that focuses on defunding the police—a proposal that means different things to different people—the liberal political class immediately began to insist on articulating demands that could be addressed to the state. This follows a pattern familiar from the Occupy movement and the rioting after police murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014. Structurally, the act of formulating demands suggests that the state is a legitimate interlocutor; it frames an uprising as a sort of militant lobbying directed at the state. By insisting on a model that centers demands, liberals position the state as the chief mechanism through which “change” occurs, ruling out the possibility of fighting against the state and the police themselves. The purpose of the demand is not so much to “win concessions” as it is to force potential uprisings back within the bounds of “acceptable” politics mediated by the state; this is why politicians always insist that movements must articulate clear demands.
\n\nBy framing the discussion around demands to defund the police rather than attempts to abolish or eliminate them, liberals shifted the discussion to the less threatening arena of policies and budgets. This also enabled them to provide the moderate elements involved in the uprising with access to political power, in order to channel that energy into the formal legislative process. The irony is that the George Floyd uprising is a result not only of the long history of racism in the United States, but also the ways that prior attempts at liberal reform have failed.
\n\nThis liberal counterinsurgency led to an inevitable conclusion: in August, Joe Biden directly declared that riots are not “protests,” essentially asserting that only attempts to engage in dialogue with the state are acceptable and that the full force of the state should be used to crush whatever ungovernable elements of the uprising remain. Biden combined both approaches—both repressing and coopting—by separating “peaceful” protesters from “rioters” and “anarchists,” then speaking directly to the most moderate demands for police reform.
\n\nBiden expresses the other element of the core paradox within state strategy: the state will allow protests, but redefines protesting to eliminate resistant elements. The goal is to provide an outlet, to allow people the opportunity to express complaints about particular state actions as long as no one challenges the state itself or the bureaucracies and parties that interface with it. This approach is fundamentally grounded in the concept of containment, according to which the state does not necessarily attempt to eliminate crisis, but rather aims to keep whatever happens under control via management and maintenance.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/14.jpg\")
In the end, liberal counterinsurgency only paves the way for a more inclusive form of far-right reaction. The white supremacist vision of the United States has always included roles for nonwhite people—as long as they are prepared to play their part in legitimizing its institutions.
\nIn the response to the George Floyd uprising, these differing approaches to law and security functioned to undermine each other; this is what set the stage for the emergence of para-state forces in response to the uprising. The “law and order” approach, based around imposing sovereignty through force, created a situation in which the forces of the state were empowered to employ increasing levels of violence to suppress the uprising. As we have seen in the streets, the use of impact munitions, beatings, arrests, and tear gas in 2020 has far outstripped any precedent in recent protest history. In response to these tactics, we saw an escalation on the part of the rebels in the streets, increasing numbers of whom began to form shield walls, bring gas masks, throw stones, and set fires, occasionally even employing firearms or Molotov cocktails. These were not aberrations, but common tactics emerging across a wide geographical area, fundamentally endangering a liberal counterinsurgency strategy based around containment.
\n\nAs conflict escalates, containment-based approaches encounter two difficulties. First, it becomes increasingly challenging to identify more moderate or “innocent” elements and to isolate them from rebellious elements. Likewise, as state violence intensifies, it becomes harder to make the argument that reformism is valid or effective. Rebels on the street became more uncompromising as the uprising stretched on, seeing how increasing police violence indicates the failures of reformist approaches. Second, containment-based approaches reveal a fundamental contradiction. These approaches necessitate legitimizing some element of the uprising, which means acknowledging the legitimacy of the critique of the American political project it articulates. Yet as an uprising becomes increasingly uncontrollable, legitimizing these criticisms is tantamount to legitimizing the violence of the uprising itself.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/2.jpg\")
For weeks, the uprising exceeded anything that the police could control.
\nAs the liberal approach to counterinsurgency contributed to legitimizing the narrative of the uprising, it came into conflict with the law-and-order approach. The law-and-order approach drove militancy in the street, which in turn drove increasingly egregious police responses, rendering it increasingly difficult to contain the crisis. At the same time, because liberals took the position of supporting the core criticisms articulated via the uprising, they could not easily abandon those assertions, even as it became difficult to find elements that would abandon those who remained active in the street. This is what created the situation in which elements of the state were compelled to exceed the bounds of the law. In this context, the state resumed its essential nature as an imposition of sovereign force, in which law is only one of several possible manifestations, but at the same time, it also began to make space for extralegal para-state forces. This, in turn, created the conditions for far-right elements to receive leeway to operate outside of the law.
\n\nThe inclusion of social forces from outside of the formal state structure in counterinsurgency strategies contains in microcosm several dynamics that have always been latent in US politics. It is from this perspective, in view of the contradictions latent in the counterinsurgency strategies deployed against the uprising, that we should understand the emerging discourse of civil war.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/5.jpg\")
In Olympia,Washington, a police officer has her picture taken with Three Percenters militiamen in early June 2020—apparently protecting an ice cream parlor—at the high point of the George Floyd uprising.
\nThe mobilization of paramilitary forces outside the limitations of the law points to a core element that is essential to this specific counterinsurgency operation as well as to the state in general. Throughout the Trump administration, we have seen the norms that formed the foundations of the perceived legitimacy of the democratic state erode. As this veneer has worn away, the state has also lost the ability to confine conflict within the bounds of the legislative process. Over the past three years, the relationship between the state and society has become increasingly characterized by material conflict. The Trump administration has used executive edict and raw violence to impose an image of America derived from the far right. This is the state as material force, pure and simple. Under Obama, repression was associated with failed compromise or the surgical precision of surveillance and drone strikes; under Trump, the naked repressive force of the state is laid bare for all to see.
\n\nInherent in the functioning of the state is the defining of what is inside it and what is outside of it. According to the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, for example, what is outside of the state is described as the “state of nature” in which life is allegedly “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” This account of the “outside” justifies the existence of the state as a mechanism to prevent what is outside from manifesting itself. Inside the state, the sovereignty of the state is considered to be total, while the outside is understood as any situation in which the sovereignty of the state is absent, or at least threatened. In US political theory, the concepts underlying the state are held to be universal, supposedly applicable to all humans. Therefore, anything outside of the state—even if that outside is geographically internal—is considered an absolute other that must be destroyed.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/11.jpg\")
While some liberal pundits have framed the politics of white grievance as a rear-guard effort from a demographic that is rapidly losing leverage in society, that perceived loss of leverage is precisely what drives these politics. If anything, we can expect to see more nationalism and white supremacism in the years to come.
\nConsequently, in the US, the paramilitary is constructed both as a force in social conflict with any geographically internal enemy defined as outside of the American project, and as a force inherently tied to the preservation of the state and the prevention of change. Until recently, the concept of the enemy was tempered by self-imposed limitations, which served to reintegrate rebels through liberal counterinsurgency methods or to concentrate state action chiefly within the legal system. Today, these limitations have outlived their usefulness and right-wing militias are eager to eliminate the “outside.”
\n\nNow that the state has dispensed with the niceties that served to conceal its core as a logistics of raw force, a few things have become clear. First, the structure of law as a concept that theoretically applies to all people equally was based in the assertion of a sort of universal inside that included all within the purview of the state. Dispensing with law except insofar as it can be manipulated to serve as a weapon, the administration has opened up a space outside of law, a terrain formed by the state of emergency. Second, the paramilitary is no longer a force separate from the state. From the perspective of the uprising, there is no distinction between struggle against the far right and struggle against the state. This is not a horizontal conflict on the level of society—that would assume that all the forces involved were part of the “inside.” Rather, this is a material conflict between the state and all those defined as outside and against it.
\n\nWith the elimination of the universality of law, framed through the concept of equal protection, and the overt incorporation of the paramilitary into state counterinsurgency strategy, the language of civil war loses its usefulness. Civil war is fundamentally a conflict between social factions, but that is not what is occurring here. That framework actually distorts the current dynamics of engagement. We are not experiencing a conflict between social factions, regardless of how the right conceives of the conflict. Rather, by incorporating the defense of the state into paramilitary doctrine and framing this around a rigid set of ideological commitments (termed “freedom,” but which really represent forms of social control), the right wing has given rise to a political conflict about the state, its role, and the structure of state and police power.
\n\nIf we embrace the concept of civil war as it has been constructed in the contemporary US context, we will find that this generates tactical problems. Embracing civil war as a strategic posture could cause us to neglect the terrain of everyday life, where the state actually operates and most conflicts play out. If we understand ourselves as contending in a civil war, we will likely look for a linear conflict between two identifiable forces fighting each other without regard to the material terrain.
\n\nWhat is at stake here is not just a conceptual distinction or a question of semantics. The core of the distinction is important to how we think of conflict in relation to the wider anarchist project.
\n\nStructures of law and capital always function to regulate and channel actions toward specific ends according to the will of those who wield sovereignty. Resistance is a concrete question of how to act to disrupt the operational logistics of the state—i.e., the police, in the broadest possible sense of the term, which is to say, all those who regulate behavior according to these dictates. If we embrace the posture of civil war, the conflict becomes conceptually displaced from the terrain of everyday life, in which the state and capital operate, into a zone of abstract opposition.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/12/07/13.jpg\")
Cops and the Klan go hand in hand: a police officer greets a paramilitary during a militia rally at the Confederate memorial in Stone Mountain, Georgia on August 15, 2020. The state is not a secondary element in today’s struggles, but the central element, supported by emerging paramilitary forces.
\nTo frame the current conflict as a civil war is to describe the state as a secondary element, rather than the focus of action, and to conceptualize the conflict as a linear struggle between two rigidly identified factions, both of which are defined prior to the opening of hostilities. This approach would produce a social conflict in which the state will inevitably play a role, but in which we will fundamentally misunderstand the terms. Rather than seeking to understand the shifts that have occurred on the level of society and the ways in which the uprising has been successfully defined as an “outside” by the state, we would end up concentrating on only one element of the collaboration between the state and para-state forces. Essentially, we would replace a struggle for everything—for the whole of life itself—with a far less ambitious struggle against other elements in the social terrain.
\n\nSeeing things that way would end up limiting our tactical options. If we base our understanding of the terms of conflict around broad conceptual categories, it will be harder for us to strategize for a kinetic conflict with the state that is in a constant process of change. In fact, adopting a framework of rigid linear conflict tends to produce conditions in which popular resistance becomes impossible. Contagious popular resistance presupposes the breakdown of the limits of the political; it manifests at the moment that the distinction breaks down between those who define themselves and their actions “politically” and those who do not. This was what made the uprising so powerful, unpredictable, and transformative, enabling it to exceed the state’s capacity to impose control. Constructing a linear conflict between predefined factions according to the framework of civil war, we would reduce those currently outside of the self-identified political movement to bystanders, lacking agency in the conflict yet still suffering its side effects. Reducing our understanding of the social terrain to the task of identifying who is “us” and who is “them” would ultimately distract us from everyone who is not already tied to an identifiable faction and from all the ways that we could act to transform that terrain itself.
\n\nThe George Floyd uprising has shown us the power latent in this concept of popular resistance, understood as a dynamic resistance. Over the past several months, the limits of the political have fundamentally ruptured, as popular understandings of the possibilities of political action have expanded to include all the elements of everyday life alongside traditional forms of activism. In this rupture, we can glimpse the dynamics of successful uprisings: the breaking down of the limitations that confine conflict within particular bounds, the generalization of this expanded sense of political conflict throughout everyday life, and the abolishing of the distinction between political spaces and other spaces of life. To embrace the framework of civil war in this context, in the ways that this concept has been defined and manifested by the right, would be to abandon the possibility unleashed by the uprising. It would mean turning away from a dynamic conflict that has been opaque in its sheer complexity and awe-inspiring in its scale. It would mean abandoning the social terrain, and, as a result, the dynamic, kinetic possibilities of popular resistance.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/17.jpg\")
Don’t forget how we got here—don’t forget what we’re here to do.
\nA few of the references that informed this analysis or are cited herein.
\n\nIn response to Donald Trump’s efforts to direct hatred against the most vulnerable sectors of the population—and the ongoing wave of shootings carried out by Trump’s supporters—we have prepared a line of posters expressing our readiness to defend everyone they are targeting. We hope these posters will appear across the country, challenging the vicious atmosphere that they are trying to create and opening up spaces in which everyone feels welcome. Please put up these posters in public places, including business establishments, universities, and schools, as well as homes and social centers. The posters are available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/2.jpg\")
\nIf you use Facebook, you can obtain a matching overlay for your profile picture here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/have-a-heart_high_ink.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/have-a-heart_color_low_ink.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/have-a-heart_BW.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/1.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/Spanish_WeAreAntifascist.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/Spanish_v2_WeAreAntifascist.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/Spanish_bw_WeAreAntifascist.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/we_defend_poster_portuguese_red_and_black.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/we_defend_poster_portuguese_red_and_white.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/we_defend_poster_portuguese_black_and_white.jpg\")
Click the image to download the poster.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/06/3.jpg\")
\nFor similar material, see our Immigrants Welcome stickers.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/10/09/the-opioid-crisis-how-white-despair-poses-a-threat-to-people-of-color", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2017/10/09/the-opioid-crisis-how-white-despair-poses-a-threat-to-people-of-color", "title": "The Opioid Crisis : White Despair and the Scapegoating of People of Color", "summary": "The opioid crisis is a prime example of how we're all obliged to pay attention to the problems of white people: when the privileged suffer, they lash out at scapegoats. Who is really responsible?", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/10/09/header.JPG", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/10/09/header.JPG", "date_published": "2017-10-09T18:18:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:35Z", "tags": [ "Opioid crisis", "racism", "white privilege" ], "content_html": "In dominant American discourse, white people are always the protagonists. Their problems and dilemmas, pleasures and pain, are treated as everyone’s primary concern. Even if you are not included in this narrative, you’re forced to reckon with it. While we anarchists would like to see a world in which no character is a caricature, in which people are not divided by race and only take delight in our differences, we are all currently obliged to pay attention to the problems of white people because, in their pain, they frequently lash out at those they perceive as their enemies. The opioid crisis is a prime example.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/10/09/3.jpg\")
\nIn an interview on National Public Radio, author Margaret Talbot describes a scene she witnessed at a softball practice in West Virginia:
\n\n\n\n\n“There were a bunch of middle school-age girls sitting on the ground comforting each other and crying, there were two little kids running around crying and screaming, and there were a lot of adults trying to help them and escort them away from the scene because two parents who had come to their daughter’s practice, a man and a woman, had both overdosed simultaneously and were lying on the field about six feet apart and in obvious need of resuscitation. Their two little younger children who had come with them were trying to get them to wake up. So Michael and his colleague were able to revive the parents using Narcan, which is the antidote to opioid overdoses—reverses them. But as is increasingly the case, it took several doses to revive them because they had probably had heroin that was cut with something stronger, possibly fentanyl. And so this was the scene that was witnessed by many people in this community who were at this softball practice on an afternoon in March.”
\n
Some of those adult witnesses, Talbot says, were encouraging the EMTs to let the parents die. This inhumanity is shocking; it’s no mystery why people like the ones in this story are trying to get high. Few people feel like their lives are worth much these days; constant low-level stress over money, family, relationships, social disorder, health, and work are features of everyone’s lives. When you’re poor, and perhaps socially isolated, those things compound. Poverty is only occasionally dramatic or joyful; mostly, it’s crushingly boring and stressful. If you are prescribed pain medication because of an injury or chronic pain, the euphoria and floating freedom may be the best you’ve felt in years. This is how most people now start their opioid addictions.
\n\nIn the 1990s, US doctors were reconsidering their beliefs about pain. Recognizing the toll that constant, low-level pain can take on the body—much like the effect of poverty upon the spirit—doctors began to prescribe pain medication more freely, believing that being free from pain might speed recovery, as well as being a boon in itself. Pharmaceutical companies told doctors that their latest pain medications were not likely to be addictive.
\n\nThis claim is true for some—some people can take opioids for a couple of days after surgery and then switch to over-the-counter medicines without a hitch. But opioids hit other people’s brains differently: they experience intense pleasure and comfort, and after a couple of weeks of ease, going off the medication can feel unbearably bleak. So people kept going back for more—and, eventually, word began to circulate about which doctors would freely prescribe pain medications. Some of these offices were the frequently-exposéd, cynically-motivated “pill farms”; others just trusted their patients. Pain is pain, the doctors reasoned, and addiction is not a sin; is it really so bad to prescribe people what they need to feel OK in the world? What is the line between Adderall and speed, Oxycontin and heroin? Only legitimacy. For people who were not comfortable thinking of themselves as criminals, it felt more possible to exaggerate to a doctor than to buy heroin on the corner.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/10/09/4.jpg\")
\nAs word spread about the accessibility of these opioid pills, heroin dealers saw their market slipping away. Cartels in Mexico, Guatemala, and other countries took notice, and started producing heroin so pure that it could be cut much more, producing a larger amount of product that could be sold for less. They also began cutting it with different chemicals, which made it far more potent and potentially deadly; and, of course, cutting heroin to sell on the black market is not an exact science.
\n\nWhen the government finally started tightening regulations for prescribing opioids and raiding pill farms, millions of addicts were left desperate, and turned at last to explicitly illegal drugs, which were now more affordable than ever—and far more dangerous. While rates of opioid and heroin addiction are not actually higher than they used to be, the rate of people dying from overdoses has skyrocketed. The doses people are used to taking may be five times as potent as before. Surely no one wants to get high at their kids’ soccer practice: what they want is to feel normal rather than ravenous for a fix, able to cheer their kids on, so they fix a hit before they arrive… but sometimes, instead of enabling them to function, the medicine knocks them out.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/10/09/5.jpg\")
Some of the victims of the overdose epidemic.
\nIt’s obvious that this crisis is receiving very different coverage than the crack epidemic of the 1990s or the heroin epidemic that preceded it in black communities. Those waves of drug use became a pretext for mass incarceration, mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, permissible racial profiling, and militarized schools, all of which put a disproportionately black and brown population in prison, disenfranchised of voting rights and unable to find legal work once they emerge. These ex-prisoners are therefore unable to exert even the slightest leverage on the government policies that incarcerated them via the traditional political means of voting, lobbying, and cutting deals. They are likely to be forced to break the law to survive, which may mean they return to prison.
\n\nA cynical person might speculate that it’s no coincidence drug laws are being reformed precisely when white people are experiencing this crisis. White people have always used drugs, of course, but it has only recently been considered a major problem. Although 33,000 people died from overdosing in 2015, there does not seem to be a corresponding wave of repression directed at that population. The liberal affect about the epidemic is one of intense sadness and loss, as though they are surveying the damage left by a hurricane—something beyond anyone’s control. Conservatives, as usual, have plenty of judgment to offer: users are depicted as trailer trash, judged for the very poverty that may have driven them to use. But there’s often a second note of anger: both impoverished white community members and the politicians they elect are looking for someone else to blame.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/10/09/1.jpg\")
\nIt’s no surprise who the scapegoat is. Black and brown people are always blamed for white despair. The same old tired narratives are trotted out: these drugs are coming from south of the border; they’re taking our jobs; their civil unrest is wrecking our communities. White people reminisce about when their towns used to have industry—jobs for lower-class people that supposedly promised a possible way out of poverty or at least allowed them to remain poor in a stable sort of way. Few white people, however, have turned towards radical politics in response to deindustrialization; most of the predominantly white communities that benefit from Medicaid expansion drug treatment still voted for Trump, who promised to repeal Obamacare. This is not entirely bad news, as it suggests people cannot be easily satisfied—they want something wholly different, not just harm reduction—but it is disturbing in light of how Trump’s presidency is likely to continue to affect black and brown people.
\n\nAll this feels depressingly routine for anyone who has been paying attention to the dominant arc of US history. Ironically, far from being responsible for the problem, many of the migrants coming to the US are fleeing the violence of the cartels responsible for producing these drugs, which are funded by the US citizens who consume their wares, not by the Mexican and Central American migrants fleeing their zones of control.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/10/09/2.jpg\")
Sure, narcotics are coming directly from Mexico into North Dakota! Mexicans must be to blame!
\nMany black people in the 1970s and ’80s fought against police harassment and for black self-determination and community involvement in drug user recovery—and sometimes, unfortunately, for heavier legal penalties and increased police harassment of predominantly black drug users. In contrast, many white people seem less eager to take responsibility or demand change along those lines. Self-declared sons of white America feel robbed of their birthright, and they want it back from their black, brown, immigrant, and off-shore brothers… never considering that it could be their own parents who are to blame. Some whites acknowledge that reforming their own behavior is part of the solution to their social problems, but many—such as the Proud Boys—aim to do so only in order to glorify and renew the misogynist, racist foundations of “Western civilization.”
\n\nThis is ironic, in that these same racialized divisions are also responsible for preventing white workers from making common cause with others to stand up for themselves against the causes of their suffering. Deindustrialization is hitting white communities now the same way that it hit black communities in the 1980s, bringing with it the addiction and despair long familiar to more targeted groups. While fascists seek to attribute responsibility for the suffering of poor white people to people of color or some sort of Jewish conspiracy, the fundamental problem is obviously capitalism. Market imperatives make dealers and cartels seek profit at any cost, just as they reward industrial corporations that shift their production facilities offshore or replace human employees with machines. It is capitalism that has broken up our communities, compelling us to chase jobs from one place to another across the continent while extractive corporations decimate the natural world we depend on for survival. To defend ourselves against this onslaught, we have to come together across all lines of identity, identifying with each other even across gulfs of privilege and fighting to abolish privilege and capitalism entirely. One of the chief reasons race was invented in the first place was to split the interests of those on the receiving end of all the disparities and misfortunes imposed by capitalism.
\n\nBut what do we do about addiction itself? In his book, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Dr. Gabor Mate reviews studies performed on rats that illumine an alternative solution to the dilemmas of white America. Mate describes how researchers addicted rats to cocaine. Predictably, the rats came back for more cocaine regularly, even feverishly. But when the rats were removed from solitary, clinical surroundings and put in a natural environment in which they could find each other and engage in more interesting activity, the rats, though already addicted, were much less interested in cocaine than in the rest of their lives.
\n\nPeople are not rats, and cocaine is not an opiate, but the implications are clear enough. To put an end to the problem of harmful addictions in our society, we have to make our world livable. This is also a way to understand the anarchist project.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/10/09/7.jpg\")
Graffiti in Montréal. The crisis is taking a toll in Canada, too.
\nAs anarchists, we aspire to fight the causes of unhappiness and poverty, to counter the strategies that our oppressors employ to drain us of emotional and material resources that could be employed outside their marketplace. We aim to interrupt the destruction of our world and our relationships and our ability to share. If we love people who are suffering from drug addiction, regardless of their race, we must make the world a more livable place. Let’s create a world no one would want to escape, in which the idea of a drug that would make us feel less alive—or a cellphone or a video game or any other product—is self-evidently undesirable.
\n\nThis means maintaining cooperative projects to support those fighting to free themselves of addiction—even Alcoholics Anonymous was founded by people reading the anarchist Peter Kropotkin to learn about how groups based in horizontal organizing and mutual aid could address their own needs together. But it also means attacking the foundations of authority in this society. When we fight against the power that capitalism and the state currently possess to determine all the possibilities of our lives, we are also fighting against the causes of addiction, racism, and despair.
\n\nPart of this undertaking is refusing to let white people blame other broke people for their difficulties. We have to show clearly who the enemy is and create avenues for finding affinity and solidarity across racial lines while demonstrating the kind of activity that it will take to solve our shared problems. We must refuse to sanction scapegoating, yet simultaneously resist the urge to treat groups of people as monsters—even those who scapegoat. The divisions that racism imposes in our communities are responsible for much of the suffering that white people experience, too—everyone has a stake in abolishing white supremacy as well as the institutions that depend on it to maintain their sway. We must introduce an anarchist tension into all these ongoing struggles for survival.
\n\nWhen we imagine this task on a global scale, it appears almost impossible. Fortunately, we encounter it broken up into smaller steps every single day.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/10/09/6.jpg\")
For a world without despair or the power disparities that cause it.
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