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Title: Responding To Fascist Organizing Author: William Gillis Date: 11th June 2018 Language: en Topics: antifascism, strategy Source: http://humaniterations.net/2018/06/11/responding-to-fascist-organizing
The great economist and early anti-statist thinker Bastiat famously
pointed out the way our attention is often drawn to the most immediate,
losing sight of the wider array of consequences and causations. Such
myopia is how modern statism flourishes, obscuring the threat of the
policeman’s pistol and the swing of his truncheon, so that a proposed
tax for instance is sliced away from all context and rendered into a
seemingly inert, docile thing.
Through centuries of hard fought progress the public has increasingly
grown adverse to violence and explicit acts of domination. It is
impossible to understate the accomplishment this represents. And yet our
rulers have compensated not by lessening their brutality but by
obscuring it. Every sociopath intuitively knows to exploit the limits of
human attention through complicated misdirection. What is seen is a
politician standing before an adoring crowd, what may go unseen is the
brutality their policy depends upon, the threat they implicitly make.
A society might appear peaceful and idyllic, with acts of brutality not
only invisible but entirely absent, and yet “that peace” be the result
of the threat of incredible violence. If the citizens of a totalitarian
regime do not resist, do not incur repression, but simply hang their
heads in submission, it would be wrong to say no violence or aggression
is present. And yet a particularly bureaucratic soul might look around
and dismiss the claims of the oppressed, might demand that they lay
their bodies on the line to make visible the implicit threat of the
state, and even then dispute that there is not enough data. Might
request that their bodies be stacked ever higher to “prove” the
systematic nature of the threat. And god forbid the threat be delayed,
the promise be made years out of violence to come. When the implicit but
very clear threat is, “We will murder you and your entire family. Not
today. But soon. Once our power has finished growing. Resist now and die
then.”
Such violent “peace” is not exclusively the product of the state. It
sneaks into human affairs on all levels. It shapes and twists our
society, our economy. The gangster in the streets whose theft is
tolerated, even made invisible, uncommented upon, because the threat is
perceived as so overwhelming. The “Move along, n—-r” that contains
mutually understood volumes of collective threat, the word resonating
and cutting with centuries of lynchings and beatings behind it, but its
meaning deniable in an instant. “How do you knoooow I meant that as a
threat?” and a flash of white teeth at the interlocutor. Such implicit
violence becomes fractional, fungible. Not every use of a racial epithet
contains it in full, but they often trade off the watered down
possibility of violence. What is 1/200th of a threat of lynching, or a
beating? Violence suffuses our world, it flows unseen through complex
circuits, accumulates in silent but vast reservoirs, rearranging and
curtailing what is possible.
When fascists or white nationalists talk of “voluntary” ethnic cleansing
we all know what they mean. The word “voluntary” is a laughable tissue,
the confident sneer of a bully who knows how to play within the
shortsighted rules, but wants almost all observers to note his audacity,
and to — in letting it pass — demonstrate their own weakness. A detailed
threat is delivered by mail and deniable reference to it made in person.
The game is simple. One oily fascist wears his suits in front of the
cameras while a broader ecosystem of fascists delivers the violence.
People of color are murdered for sport, anti-racist activists are
assassinated, prison nazis sand off people’s skin and dump their bodies
in public. Shaggy sings, “it wasn’t me.”
They know it’s a game, their with-a-wink pretenses of distance, “nazism
was about a particular historical context”, “I have my critiques of
Hitler”, “oh I don’t hang with those specific guys” are never meant to
stand firmly, they’re more about poking fun at the self-constraint of
formal systems and dissolve under even a moment’s scrutiny.
When neonazis march through a town their action is precisely that: an
action. A demonstration of force. A threat. A two part declaration: “We
will exterminate you. Here are the tools we will use, the strength we
have amassed for the task.” Its character is hardly invisible to those
targeted.
And yet, true to form, most liberals are seemingly incapable of
recognizing the act for what it is, of looking beyond their noses to any
semblance of context. In the liberal’s mind a march of goosestepping
nazis carrying weapons through a black neighborhood is just a parade of
people with bad opinions.
Similarly when a representative of a neonazi group sets up a table at a
metal show or steps before the cameras the oh-so-astute public notices
that they’re not murdering anyone at the moment. Just recruiting people
to murder in the future. Like the army recruiter that likewise preys on
disaffected youth the public largely cannot see such recruitment as
inextricable from a larger mechanism of violence. The very point of such
individual acts of recruitment is to add up into an unstoppable army
when it finally decides to initiate force en masse.
Yet just as the state’s necessarily simplistic legal system discretizes
every single action, stripping away vital context, so too have the
public’s moral analytic capacities atrophied to only recognize the most
immediate, the most apparent. There’s utility to such constraint in
certain arenas, we would never want to give the state the capacity to
determine what discourse is permissible, or to prosecute nazis for their
beliefs (despite conservative hysteria by all accounts the vast majority
of antifascist activists are anarchists who have consistently opposed
state legislation and the “antifa bolts” famously stand for opposition
to Bolshevism as well as fascism). The reality is that every individual
is capable of greater perception and intelligence than the state, of
directly seeing realities the state is structurally incapable of
parsing. When a trusted friend tells you someone raped them you’ll
likely cancel your date with him, even if your friend’s testimony alone
wouldn’t and shouldn’t be sufficient to convict in a court of law. As
autonomous individuals we can and should take actions that based on our
more intimate and direct knowledge — knowledge it would be impossible to
systematize or make objective in some legal system. It will always be
possible to construct threats of violence sufficiently obscured as to be
rendered invisible or plausibly deniable to some observers but crystal
clear to the recipient(s). This is one of the innate failings of
codified justice systems, abstracted to some level of collectivity, and
part of the reason ethics enshrines individual agency above legality.
If the first step on the road to fascism is blinding ourselves to its
violence, the second step is denying our agency to respond.
Let us be absolutely clear though that formal “fascism” and the broader
white nationalist ecosystem around it constitutes but one type of
authoritarianism. While its aspirations are grave and its spectre is on
the rise, there are many other flavors of authoritarianism alive in our
world, currently wielding far more power. These authoritarianisms are
presenting killing far far more people than some scrawny white
nationalist pricks hanging out in /pol/ and occasionally shooting up
protesters, and these other authoritarianisms absolutely must be
countered.
But. Nevertheless the history of the last century overwhelmingly shows
that fascism constitutes a relatively unique threat that must be
diligently resisted, lest certain dynamics particular to it otherwise
spiral into runaway growth. The threat it poses to ethics, modernity and
to civilization is always present (despite its occasional opportunistic
adoption of those mantles), it can be countered, but to do so requires
us to get serious. To understand its function and its motivation.
There are broadly two common sources of authoritarianism:
The first is a kind of inane and “edgy” consequentialism that, upon
realizing ends can justify means, leaps to grab onto the most stupid and
violent of means. If you want to bake a blueberry pie then obviously you
should ban independent press and gulag all the kulaks. While these
authoritarians sometimes start with relatable aims, their misstep is to
view “power” as a universal currency and without externalities. At some
point they internalize the assumption that if you want to get ___ done
you should obtain power, whereupon you will just be able to do it. They
fail to grasp that some ends are impossible to accomplish through social
control and coercion, and that such means have tendencies of their own.
This authoritarianism is the blind tantrum of a child demanding that
their parents make water less wet. Its watchwords are “There should be a
law.” Obviously it’s the dominant form of authoritarianism found in
liberals and socialists.
The second kind of authoritarianism views power not as a means but as an
ends. In practice these are typically people for whom the unfortunate
homo sapiens preoccupation with social standing has festered into a
blistering wound. In this virulent pathology power is near enough to the
sole ends in life and everything else is a delusion that risks rendering
you instrumental in someone else’s power. This ideological sociopathy is
utterly uninterested in reality. To paraphrase Scott Alexander, there
are no philosopher Trumps. Fascism has from the start demonstrated a
well documented postmodern mutability, happily contorting its stated
beliefs or tenets into all kinds of incoherencies and absurdities. This
sort of authoritarian intuitively understands discourse as just another
arena of positioning and ideology as just another shell game. Every
statement is reduced into terms of affect, allegiance, and the
disruption of any process that might be bent by the pressures of
objectivity. Karl Rove’s “We make our own reality” hangs among a
pantheon of other Orwellian admissions by this sort of authoritarian.
This form of authoritarianism is widespread among conservatives, who
often admit to seeing liberal democracy or even religion as useful lies
when pressed. And individuals with such nihilistic perspectives can be
found in literally any social space — certainly inclusive of social
justice movements — usually acting as predators and climbing social
ladders. But its most consistent and large-scale ideological expression
lies in fascism.
There are of course in practice many other niche mutations and
subspecies of authoritarianism. One increasingly prominent example are
reactionaries who seek to disable and impede technological capacity —
ideologically committed to a world of immediatism or a return to some
‘essential human nature’, they seek impose a material state of affairs
where possibility is dramatically curtailed. If you bomb everyone back
to the stone age then you no longer need active jailers to prevent
creativity and connection, the muddy ruined landscape itself provides
the constraint. In such case the kernel of authoritarianism lies in the
ideological fixation, the hunger for a certain simplicity, that is then
achieved through the suppression of others’ options. But like other
niche expressions such an authoritarianism is thankfully still quite
rare.
What’s important to note is that every species of authoritarianism
demands a different response.
The authoritarianism of a liberal or socialist, being instrumental and
arising from profound ignorance, lacks a self-awareness and can be
effectively challenged in debate. That is not of course necessarily to
say that the authoritarian liberal or socialist will themselves retreat
from their ridiculous policies upon evidence, but that they lack the
conscious duplicity to really prepare for counter-evidence. Bring to
light the vicious physical brutality hidden in their cigarette tax or
the clear ludicrousness of a transitional dictatorship that will “wither
away” to create a free society and the sincere liberal or socialist is
left spinning in circles, trying to find places of retreat on the fly,
the ineptitude of their proffered means apparent to all direct
observers, and defanged of serious recruiting capacity.
Nothing could be less the case with a nazi. An actual fascist is well
aware that some proposed policy may not have much of a leg to stand on.
They are prepared for objective reality to line up against them. They
know at heart that their race statistics are often false,
misrepresented, or actually evidence for the reverse of their claims and
insinuations. Not only does this not matter to them, they strategize
from the beginning with it in mind. A fascist cares only about the
landscape of power and how they can shift it to make them “win”. I want
to be clear here: the problem isn’t merely that they’re arguing in
conscious bad faith, fascists have no monopoly on that — nor even do
authoritarians — the problem is what this arises from: a hunger for
social power, and how fundamental it is to their position. Fascist
recruitment doesn’t function in terms of persuasion, it functions in
terms of promises of power.
Authoritarian personalities flock to movements that promise them
comfortably easy solutions, but more self-aware authoritarians flock to
movements that promise them power.
The primary recruitment tool of the fascist is the appearance of power.
This is why fascists — and those other self-aware authoritarians in
their general orbit including Stalinists and Maoists — focus so strongly
on aesthetics and rituals that reinforce perceptions of broad
popularity, community, strength-by-association and general social
standing. Those movements that only whine, offering victimization
narratives and promises of power without any tangible content to them,
rarely recruit any lasting base of self-aware authoritarians (although a
few will surreptitiously set up shop to prey upon the few true believers
and deadenders). Appearance of strength and legitimacy is everything,
without it fascist movements dry up. No self-aware authoritarian wants
to back a loser cause.
This is why refusing fascists the legitimization of a platform and
violently countering their rallies has worked so well historically. The
authoritarian base that fascists recruit from, don’t share the instincts
of proponents of liberty, they aren’t attracted to underdogs with no
hope, they aren’t compelled to self-sacrifice in defense of the weak,
they’re attracted to supermen on the rise. When a nazi gets up on a
stage to call for genocide his arguments don’t matter, it’s the potency
of the act, the very fact that he was able to get on that stage and say
such things in the first place, that recruits.
Fascists make a mockery of debate intentionally, in the authoritarian
mind it’s inherently just positioning and only fools take ideas
seriously. From such a perspective the fascist that discards the
existing norms, that dances around in a flagrantly bad faith way,
demonstrates a kind of strength in honesty. The only honesty, in their
mind, being that truth and ideas don’t matter. Power matters, power
through deception and manipulation — the capacity to get someone to put
you on a stage, in a position of respect, despite your flagrant
dishonesty — and power through physical strength — the capacity to march
in the open, in great numbers, with weapons, with muscles, trappings of
masculinity, displays of wealth, etc. Widespread mockery can hurt
fascists by demonstrating their unpopularity, but so long as they have
other sorts of power to fall back on the fascist can simply tell himself
“this is the real power, this is the only thing that actually matters,
what those people have is fake and hollow, that they will be
overthrown.”
Regardless of whether or not you agree with it or consider it ethical,
people punch fascists because it frequently works.
When you hurt a proponent of liberty we flock to each other’s aid, when
you hurt an authoritarian other authoritarians are instinctively
disgusted by his weakness and most scuttle further away. Sure, a tiny
embittered core remains, some fools without the self-awareness of their
own authoritarianism and other authoritarians now too invested to
escape, and some misguided defenders of underdogs might come to their
aid, but the compounding growth of the movement is derailed: few
authoritarian personalities feel much inclined to join a bunch of
powerless whiners.
There are, of course, complexities. Many authoritarian communists, for
instance — despite similar totalitarian aspirations as explicit fascists
— vary in degrees of self-awareness among their base about their hunger
for power. Movements like Stalinism and Maoism depend on broad bases of
leftist fools who swallow the simplistic doublethink necessary to see
Assad or Bob Avakian as noble oppressed underdogs. Still, when
anarchists have fought them in the streets, as for example in Athens or
Minneapolis, there has appeared to result a shrink in their base, or at
least a bluntening of their power. Certain currents in today’s alt-right
follow a comparable dynamic, mixing self-aware authoritarians alongside
psuedo-libertarian fools who swallow the doublethink necessary to see
people organizing for racial genocide as allies and feminist media
reviewers as dire enemies.
It will certainly be the case that the tactics and strategies employed
with such success against boneheads in the 80s that drove them off the
streets and largely dissolved their ranks will transfer in their
entirety to the fight against garbage-tier memelords like Richard
Spencer, but it also does not appear that antifascist groups are copying
them over fullcloth. There have been many eras and contexts of
resistance to fascism, with many differences between them. The awkward
dance of someone like Spencer as opposed to an outright prison nazi is
to try to look like a hardass to cement his base while playing the
victim for liberals to milk them of prestige and legitimacy. This is not
an easy dance, and is prone to derailment from multiple fronts.
We are in a new landscape, and people oppose fascism from all sorts of
angles and perspectives, it is up to us to find effective means of
countering them. To flood the market of antifascist resistance, as it
were, with diverse innovations and let the best rise on their own. But
we should also not neglect the lessons of the past and insights of
antifascists in communities throughout time and around the world. When
an army is being built, when it is rolling toward you, is not the time
to debate it, or to snicker in complacency at its lies and
contradictions. When a force openly plans to exterminate you, we cannot
afford the naivety of waiting for it with open arms — as Gandhi advised
people do of the Third Reich — hoping you will last long enough to
dissolve it from the inside. When generals talk of plans to invade and
suppress free speech, when politicians propose legislation to bar
freedom of movement, you do not waste time worrying if your resistance
will in the process undermine the free speech or freedom of movement of
those generals and politicians. You resist.
Anarchists and libertarians come in many stripes, consequentialist and
not.
Personally — as a consequentialist seeking to maximize the liberty of
all — my perspective is straightforward: while there are externalities
to some acts to stay mindful of, and we have social norms and detentes
of significant value, one cannot afford to take a reactive stance, to
merely wait while fascists mobilize — drunk on their own perception of
power — and hope for the best. There are dangers, slippery slopes, and
corruptive human instincts to watch out for in our resistance, but such
demand vigilance not total abstention or a bureaucratic
shortsightedness.
On the other hand those who closely heed to pacifism or non-aggression
in good faith must still ask themselves when an act or threat of
violence despite being obscured or ‘unseen’ is still a pressing one,
what proportionality and prioritization looks like, what preparations
are called for before the seen “moment” of aggression, and generally
what can still be done to counter fascist organizing efforts on all
fronts. Even if you oppose punching a nazi leader, there’s still much
that can be done. If nazis march through a town in a demonstration of
force, show up with your own guns ready to fire back. When nazis
organize online, systematically disrupt and expose their efforts. Yes,
today’s alt-right is a mealymouthed lot, mixing self-aware
authoritarianism with whiny pretenses of libertarianism, and much can be
accomplished peeling off the small swamp of useful fools they depend
upon, forcing into the light the audacity of their pretense to the
accomplishments of liberty while fetishizing nationality and borders — a
claim of collective ownership as absurd as any Soviet gosplan
proclamation and inherently murderous and totalitarian in
implementation. But we must recognize that claims to the legacy and
aspirations of liberty are rarely made with any sincerity. The core of
these people are not mistaken about means, their authoritarianism is not
the idiotic quick-solution authoritarianism of most liberals and
socialists; their draw is power itself. The boneheads and trolls
slathering at the thought of genocide and apartheid are open enemies of
discourse and rationality itself. They believe they can bypass debate,
derail it, make a mockery of it, use it to hide the circuits of their
violence, the shell game of their aggression. They believe that physical
force is the only thing that matters. We cannot afford to ignore that
language.