FEATURE: FASCISM AND ANTI-FASCISM, PART IFascism… why even talk about it? At the end of World War II, with the Axis powers defeated, fascism was over. Mussolini was gone, Nazism was discredited, and the world moved on into the Cold War era. There might be a few isolated wingnuts today who are keeping the dream alive, but they’re so marginal that nobody cares what they think. Right?
Wrong. Fascism remains a serious threat across the world to this day. Not convinced? Let’s start with the recent murder of antifascist rapper Killah P, which we reported in the Hot Wire. Is this an isolated incident? One of Killah P’s friends in the Greek hip hop scene [mentions in an interview that the fascist Golden Dawn party responsible for his death has been implicated in many violent attacks on immigrants across Greece in recent years. But it took the murder of a Greek person for the government and mass media to suddenly decide to take them seriously. After years on the extreme margins of Greek politics, in the last couple of years the Golden Dawn’s popularity has spiked amidst the economic crisis and anti-austerity upheavals, commanding the support of as much as 15% of the population in polls.
But certainly Greece is a special case, right?
Wrong again. Fascist violence has been escalating around the world.
In June, 18 year old anarchist anti-fascist Clement Meric was murdered by neo-Nazi skinheads in Paris. His death is linked to the rise of the well-funded neo-fascist youth movement in France that has dovetailed with broad conservative mobilization against gay marriage and immigration. The French radical left erupted in protest after his death; yet as a group of Clement’s friends pointed out afterwards, in the days leading up to and after his death, numerous other homophobic and anti-immigrant attacks were taking place, while the French state continued to round up immigrants and requested pardon for a cop who committed two racist murders in 2007. The group wrote, “ClÈment was not just murdered by a gang of fascists…
ClÈment is, more broadly, the victim of the swift rise of the most pernicious ideas and their growing acceptability in France and elsewhere in Europe… The confidence shown by the extreme right is made possible by and feeds upon the racist, xenophobic, homophobic statements and actions coming from and authorized by the institutions of power.”
This summer in Germany, the trial began of a Neo-Nazi who participated in ten murders of immigrants over nearly a decade of racist terror, taking place with at least partial knowledge and complicity of state security forces.
In Serbia, the state again banned a gay pride march in Belgrade, claiming that it could not protect marchers from right-wing violence.
Over the past year, fascists in the Ukraine have made over twenty violent attacks on radical activists and journalists, including the near-fatal beating of an anarchist in Kiev in April by five Nazis. The attacks continue with virtual impunity from police.
And last year in Russia, an anarchist was brutally murdered by a gang of Nazis in Samara, while in 2009, another anti-fascist was shot to death in Moscow. And a Nazi sympathizer in the Spanish army murdered a 16 year old anti-fascist at a racist demonstration in Madrid in 2007. We could go on and on.
OK, so this is clearly horrible, but it’s just a European phenomenon, right? Thank goodness we don’t have anything like this here in the US. Sure, the Ku Klux Klan used to be terrible, but the Civil Rights Movement took care of that, right?
Wrong again. For one example, thousands of migrants from Mexico and Latin America have died along the border in recent years, killed by Border Patrol agents or racist vigilantes, or from exposure or thirst while attempting to avoid these murderous forces.
[Thousands of homophobic, racist, and anti-immigrant attacks](
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/h ... nts?page=1 S) have taken place over the past decades in the US, many by members of organized fascist groups. Some incidents of homophobic or racist violence, such as the 1998 killings of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., made national headlines. Yet extreme-right violence has largely flown under the radar; in that same year, Neo-Nazis murdered Spit and Dan, two members of Anti-Racist Action, in Nevada, while others beat Ethiopian immigrant Mulugeta Selaw to death in Oregon, yet these killings never catalyzed similar national outrage.
Occasionally when a white supremacist is arrested and found to have massive caches of weapons and ammunition, a brief shudder runs through the public consciousness, but then recedes. Yet fascist violence has flared up again and again over the past decades. Back through the 1970s and 80s, the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party were responsible for numerous instances of racist and homophobic violence, including the notorious 1979 Greensboro Massacre, where racists murdered five radicals at an anti-Klan demonstration with the complicity of local police and were acquitted by an all-white jury.
What’s happening? What is this horrific movement that won’t seem to die? Why is the state often complicit in certain kinds of right-wing violence while the media ignores it? How can we stop it? Over the next two episodes we’re going to look at fascism and resistance to it. We’ll begin in this episode by attempting to clarify what it is we’re talking about when we speak of fascism, and we’ll look at anti-fascist action in recent years across the US. In the next episode, we’ll look in more depth into the international history of anarchist struggles against fascism since its first emerged, and the lessons we can learn for our struggles today.
First of all, what is “fascism”? The word gets thrown around quite widely, especially among radicals. The term has been applied to everyone from bigots of all sorts to cops and state agents that exert oppressive power to, at times, almost anyone who takes militant action outside of democratic process. Let’s see if we can rein it in a little bit.
Who are we talking about when we speak of fascists? There are neo-Nazis, immersed in anti-Semitic conspiracies and idolizing Hitler’s Germany. There’s the Ku Klux Klan and other white nationalist and neo-Confederate groups who want a return to a racially divided society and believe in myths of white supremacy. There are anti-immigrant zealots obsessed with national identity, and those whose apocalyptic religious fervor takes a racial dimension. Among all of these there are infinite variations, but what common links do they share?
One of the challenges in coherently defining fascism is that there’s never been a single platform or consistent ideology. In certain contexts it’s a definitively right-wing phenomenon, as in Hungary or Serbia today, while in others it doesn’t map neatly onto a left/right spectrum, as in Mussolini’s Italy. In France and Serbia, fascists use the social upheavals around gay rights to gain leverage by emphasizing homophobia; on the other hand, extreme right parties that focus more on Islamophobia and anti-immigrant populism may have active gay supporters, even leaders, such as the assassinated Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. Many brands of fascism are anti-Semitic, while others focus on xenophobia or anti-black racism but have no particular qualm with Jews; for example, Mussolini only began repression against Italian Jews, many of whom had supported the early years of the fascist regime, when alliance with Hitler’s rabidly anti-Semitic Germany became centrally important.
In practice, fascism has been opportunistic, shifting according to different political circumstances. For instance, the focus on Islamophobia among European fascists today would have seemed irrelevant during the 1920s and 30s, but today offers a basis for right-wing populism among Europeans who feel threatened by the presence of large numbers of Islamic immigrants among them.
So one thing we can say about fascism is that it attempts to be a mass popular movement. It’s not an elite or highbrow movement, although it advocates for strong centralized power in the state. It plugs into broad currents of social discontent and offers an authoritarian vision of society as a solution.
Another core principle is nationalism: the mass politics of fascism rest on shared myths of racial or historical identity. Politics based on these identities operate through scapegoating, attributing social problems not to structural oppression or the actions of states but to the characteristics of people within social groups defined as outside the imagined community of the nation. The particular form of bigotry may vary, depending on what kinds of oppressive myths a particular nationalism dictates. Often times this hatred of the outsider forms the only basis of an increasingly flimsy sense of nationhood.
The Coming Insurrection illustrates this in their discussion of the role of xenophobia in propping up French identity in an increasingly atomized society:
“We have arrived at a point of privation where the only way to feel French is to curse the immigrants and those who are more visibly foreign. In this country, the immigrants assume a curious position of sovereignty: if they werenít here, the French might stop existing.”
This turns on its head the typical fascist claim that immigrants threaten the racial existence of a nation, such as the frenzied fears of US racists about demographic shifts that may result in a white minority. In fact, without blacks to blame for crime, Mexicans to blame for job losses, Jews to blame for the banking crisis, gays to blame for undermining the traditional family, and so on and so on… we would actually have to look at capitalism, oppression, and state power to figure out why we have the problems we have today.
And that’s why another consistent feature of fascism is virulent opposition to communists, anarchists, and most other radicals. Many of the violent attacks by European fascists we mentioned earlier targeted political radicals. Fascist punk bands continue the Cold War with Rock Against Communism, linking opposition to radical politics with anti-Semitism and racism. Why such a focus on fighting radicals and leftists? Well, in large part because they’ve been the most prominent militant anti-fascists since the beginning. And allying with powerful conservative forces against radicals can bring leverage and legitimacy to the extreme right wing. But fundamentally the reason for this opposition is because radicals also mobilize around discontent in society, but rather than offering false racist explanations and oppressive solutions, look at the root causes and promote solidarity among all people towards a freer world. And this puts us in direct competition with fascists, who rely on duping people into channeling their legitimate rage into hatred for oppressed groups and support for hierarchical power.
If we close our eyes and imagine what fascism looks like today, we might envision imposing young white men with shaved heads and brass knuckles. This is certainly part of the face of contemporary fascism, but in the US today you’re more likely to see white supremacists in suits and ties or dresses than steel-toed boots and bomber jackets. A shift has taken place in fascist circles towards the appearance of respectability, in part due to the success of anti-fascists in physically confronting them at public rallies and in part due to the broader right-wing trend towards integration into universities, think tanks, and conferences. Beginning with holocaust denial among anti-Semitic historians, fascists have attempted to capitalize on liberal principles of free speech and the marketplace of ideas to demand that their oppressive views receive consideration. This manipulation of free speech rhetoric facilitated the emergence of student organizations such as Youth for Western Civilization.
This suit-and-tie approach is also used to infiltrate existing organizations on both the right and the left. The modern environmental movement in the US offers disturbing examples of this. Anti-immigrant and racist groups insinuated themselves into the national leadership of the Sierra Club across the 1990s and into the 2000s. They pushed ideas of eugenics, population control, and immigration restriction into the consciousness of green activists and attempted to sway the group’s board elections and public positions. In addition to the green movement, fascists of various stripes have attempted to make headway into the anti-globalization and anti-war movements, Palestinian solidarity, the Tea Party, the fringes of Occupy, libertarians… anywhere they sense discontent, they appear to offer false solutions to the crises we face.
So what have anti-fascists done to challenge these groups from leeching off of movements and spreading violent hate?
One of the major forms that anti-fascist organizing has taken in the US over the past decades has been Anti-Racist Action, or ARA, which has consistently confronted racist and neo-Nazi events and campaigns across North America. Founded in 1987 in Minneapolis/St. Paul among participants in the anti-racist skinhead punk subculture, ARA chapters soon spread around the US and Canada, affiliated in a loose network that held gatherings and published newsletters. ARA labeled their policy towards fascists as “expose, oppose, and confront.” Their actions ranged from publishing personal information of closet fascists to physically shutting down racist meetings and concerts to attending demonstrations in solidarity with a variety of other overlapping struggles. Influenced by European anti-fascist groups, the ARA network adopted the “no platform” approach of being open to a wide range of political perspectives under the antifascist banner. But from the beginning, the ARA network reflected a strong anarchist and feminist focus, and worked closely with the Love and Rage Anarchist Federation.
The four ARA points of unity read:
-We go where they go. Whenever fascists are organizing or active in public, we’re there. We don’t believe in ignoring them or staying away from them. Never let the Nazis have the street!
-We don’t rely on the cops or courts to do our work for us. This doesn’t mean we never go to court, but the cops uphold white supremacy and the status quo. They attack us and everyone who resists oppression. We must rely on ourselves to protect ourselves and stop the fascists.
-Non-sectarian defense of other anti-fascists. In ARA, we have a lot of different groups and individuals. We don’t agree about everything and we have a right to differ openly. But in this movement an attack on one is an attack on us all. We stand behind each other.
-We support abortion rights and reproductive freedom. ARA intends to do the hard work necessary to build a broad, strong movement against racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, discrimination against the disabled, the oldest, the youngest, and the most oppressed people. We want a classless, free society. We intend to win!"
Through the 1990s into the 2000s over 100 chapters affiliated with the ARA network existed around the country, plus many in Canada. At large mobilizations such as the “Battle of York” in 2002, they consistently shut down fascist events in militant confrontations, while many others were pre-empted by community organizing. They mobilized against Nazi efforts infiltrate youth subcultures and music scenes, challenged street gangs, outed prominent white supremacists, and in many cases faced consequences ranging from liberal condemnation to physical threats to legal charges for their resistance. Today there are at least a dozen chapters still active, though many more folks come out of the woodwork to attend demonstrations.
Another major dimension of antifascist activity involves research on fascist groups, which is crucial to exposing and confronting them wherever they appear. Numerous groups exist to track fascist organizing in the US and beyond. Some, such as the One People’s Project, are directly affiliated with anti-fascist social movements. However, more mainstream and widely funded research groups often target anarchists and radical activists as well as fascists under a generic and depoliticized category of “extremism.” As early as 2000, the Anti-Defamation League identified the circled A as a racist symbol on their “Hate on Display” website, despite acknowledging that most if not all of those who sported it adhered to vehemently anti-racist beliefs. Likewise, the Southern Poverty Law Center issued a report after the Seattle WTO protests implying that black bloc anarchists were in league with violent fascists. Today they toe the government line of identifying animal and earth liberation activists as moral equivalents to neo-Nazis who kill others in pursuit of a world based on racist oppression. Collaboration between law enforcement and supposedly anti-fascist researchers, including SPLC and the UK-based publication “Searchlight,”(
http://www.libcom.org/history/1985–2001-anti-fascist-action-afa ) has done serious damage to trust and organizing relationships among anti-fascists.
And how does the state respond? As we pointed out in our discussion of the recent history of fascist violence, often it takes place with the knowledge and tacit permission of state forces. While the FBI and other law enforcement agents have often infiltrated fascist groups, they have consistently allowed these groups to carry out violent acts, even going so far as to incite and provide weapons to them. White supremacists populate the ranks of police, prison guards, the military, and the border patrol, giving them the opportunity to enforce violent oppression with the backing of the state.
At the same time, the political climate prioritizes prosecuting so-called violence that destabilizes property relations rather than attacks that increase dependence on the state for security. That’s why the Earth Liberation Front remains the top domestic terrorism threat in the US, despite having never killed nor injured a single person, while abortion clinic bombers, anti-immigrant vigilantes, and armed white separatists receive little attention.
When it does become politically necessary to take action against hate groups and their violent members, the state uses the framework of the “hate crime,” which uses the ideology of an attacker as a basis for lengthening their prison sentence. Apart from the fact that incarceration is not solution to fascism and hate crime laws only strengthen the prison industrial complex, these laws use a vague category of “bias,” rather than socially oppressive action, as the punishable offense. This has lead to prosecution for supposedly anti-white or anti-heterosexual “hate crimes,” and even an effort to characterize anti-capitalism as a form of bias in cases of property destruction!
This context obscures the reality of racism and fascism today. Dominant media narratives reflect the illusion of a post-racial society, which obviously obscures the persistence of a massively racist social order secured through prisons, police, the military, and global capitalism. The myth that the election of Obama proves that we’ve transcended white supremacy as a society allows anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, and other fascist organizing trends to appear falsely race-neutral and gain legitimacy. At the same time, progressive anti-racist discourses focus on institutional oppression and privilege theory, reasonably enough, but claim that fascists are marginal and irrelevant. This is both offensive to their victims and dangerously out of touch with the history and current global reality of fascist organizing.
We will never forget Killah P, Clement, Spit and Dan, those who die in the deserts of Arizona whose names we’ll never know, and all the other victims of fascist violence. And the best way we can remember them is by staying committed to anti-fascist struggle everywhere.
