Why I’m Anti-Fascist

I had planned on getting this blog started slowly — a couple of weeks of “core concepts” posts just to get my feet under me, and then moving into the chunkier stuff, political theory, social critiques and current events.

Instead, current events got ahead of me: On Saturday, June 1st, “Yellow Vest” alt-right protesters in Hamilton attacked a smaller group of anti-fascist counter-protesters in full view of the Hamilton police. The police did nothing. A number of anti-fascists were injured and one woman was hospitalized. The press, either local or national, has not bothered to report on this incident.

On Sunday June 2nd, the screenshots above were posted from the Hamilton Yellow Vest group in which members Justin Long, John Alexander, Steve Stapleton and Andy Taylor openly boasted about the assault and plotted to track down and assault anti-fascists at their homes. This has been reported to the police. The police are doing nothing. Frankly, the historical reputation of the Hamilton Police Service is not only will they do nothing, they will likely aid and abet fascist violence against anti-fascists.

And make no mistake: The Yellow Vest movement in Canada is a fascist one. It might not have started that way, but it’s definitely been taken over by violent extreme-right wingers and — without any hyperbole whatsoever — literal Nazis. Some of the people who attacked the antifa protesters on Saturday were reportedly sporting swastika patches on their yellow vests. Infamous white nationalist (and perennial lunatic-fringe candidate) Paul Fromm regularly attends their demonstrations. And despite the protestations of the people who have joined the Yellow Vests in Canada, if their movement (which started from an anti-immigrant, anti-union, pro-unrestricted-capitalist beginning, mind you) isn’t actively fascist now, it’s most certainly fascist-adjacent. Members of the Soldiers of Odin and the Proud Boys are also part of the demonstrations in Hamilton, and both groups are notoriously violent right-wing extremists. Hamilton is known a haven for fascists, up to and including the corporation of the city of Hamilton itself quietly employing a known neo-nazi leader and concealing that fact from the public.

Fascism is on the rise across the western world, emboldened by the election of Donald Trump and likely encouraged by Vladimir Putin. The response to this threat and in the absence of any kind of leadership from the political classes, is grassroots anti-fascist organizing, often referred to as “antifa”, as though it were a single organized group or faction opposed to the alt-right. (Spoiler alert: it isn’t.)

The philosophy and goals of anti-fascist action are complex, intersectional, and often multilayered. I’m not going to get too deep into them here, because, as I’ve said before on this blog, I’m not an expert sociologist or political theorist. If you are interested in an intellectual examination of anti-fascism, even if only as a phenomenon of our culture over the past hundred years or so, then I wholeheartedly encourage you to watch Oliver Thorn’s YouTube video The Philosophy of Antifa, on his channel Philosophy Tube. It’s a long video, almost 68 minutes, but I cannot recommend Thorn’s thoughtful, balanced, and erudite analysis of this issue enough. (Honestly, make some popcorn, get comfortable, and then listen to his lecture. It’s eye-opening and possibly even life-changing.)

At its core, however, anti-fascist action is the direct opposition, by diverse tactics and strategies, of the resurgence of fascism in our communities and society.

I am anti-fascist. For the Yellow Vests, not to mention the Proud Boys and Soliders of Odin and the III%ers and Kevin Goudreau’s Canadian Nationalist Party and all the other alt-right groups active in Canada today, all of whom use euphemisms to describe their racist and fascist sympathies (“white nationalist”, “European traditionalist”, “pro-western chauvinist”, etc.) the fact that I would “admit” to being anti-fascist makes me deserving of — at best — a savage beating. Many of them will frankly want me dead… and that done as cruelly as possible.

And yet, I am anti-fascist. I associate with other anti-fascists, I support anti-fascist organizing, I participate in anti-fascist direct action, and I encourage others to do so. In fact, one of the reasons I started this blog was to be able to write openly about anti-fascism and the increasingly alarming need for action on that front.

As you can see from the screencaps above, the alt-right and neo-fascist groups of all flavours despise antifa, deriding us simultaneously (and illogically) as cowardly communist scum and dangerous leftist terrorists. But of course that’s not the case that we’re either cowards or terrorists: Anti-fascists arise in response to fascist aggression; my personal favourite metaphor is that if fascism is a disease than anti-fascists are antibodies of democracy. There are a number of communists who identify as anti-fascist, of course, but antifa includes many people who are not politically communist, including myself. One of the many forms of bad-faith arguments the alt-right throws at antifa to discredit them and/or derail the discussion is to claim that Communism killed as many people as Fascism; a valid criticism, but somewhat logically inconsistent — “you’re just as bad as us and we’re pretty fucking awful” doesn’t seem like the best defense of your political views. (Quick aside: as an anarchist I oppose authoritarianism on both the left and right of the political spectrum, but a comparative analysis of Stalinism, Maoism and Fascism is not what this blog post is about. Perhaps another post down the road.)

But while I’m not as qualified as a professional philosopher like Oliver Thorn to comment on the intricacies of anti-fascist political thought, I am going to explain my own reasons for being openly and proudly anti-fascist.

First and completely honestly, sheer self-interest. Fascism is a political philosophy that is dedicated to the eradication of any and all who fail to meet its imagined standards of purity — racial purity, sexual purity, and ideological purity. I meet none of those, except possibly that of so-called “racial” purity. It is one of the darker family legends that, during the Nazi occupation of Hungary, our family was actually certified as “racially superior” by Nazi pseudoscience… a fact that becomes deeply funny, albeit in a very morbid way, at any gathering of my relatives. (However much I love my kin, I have to admit that we’re a collection of nearsighted receding hairlines who bear a greater resemblance to Shrek than the Übermensch.)

Second, I’m not stupid. I can read history books and watch old documentaries and make informed conclusions on what happened. But just as modern Nazis think they can improve on original-issue fascism, they also think they can sell it to an unsuspecting public, so they present a sanitized version of Nazi atrocities. They cherry-pick their facts: Holocaust deniers attempt to minimize or outright erase the systematic murder of Jews, homosexuals and other “undesirables” by the Nazi state in an attempt to rehabilitate the Nazi’s philosophy for modern consumption; Fascists try and distance Mussolini from Hitler in order to put a gloss on Fascism to make it more appealing in the social-media age, and so on.

Fascists also operate in a weird realm of what Oliver Thorn refers to in the video mentioned above as “moon logic”. Fascists will start from a basic premise that seem reasonable, and then just go off on weird tangents that do not track logically in order to justify their position. Conspiracy theories abound; one of the current favourites is to claim that there’s a plot by “globalist elites” (read: Jews) to commit “white genocide” by encouraging Muslims to move to western “white” countries and then out-breed whites in order to eradicate the “white race.”

What’s really happening is that people of all colours are moving around our world because that’s what people are allowed to do. People are marrying each other and having kids because that’s what people do, regardless of individual religious or ethnic backgrounds. There is no conspiracy of “white genocide”, there’s a natural trend — over the course of centuries — of demographic shift. And if there’s any “global elites” we have to worry about, it’s the 2800 billionaires around the world who control, without oversight or accountability, the bulk of the planet’s resources, not some bullshit 19th-century antisemitic lie.

Also, and this is a major pet peeve of mine as a writer, fascists use propaganda, dogwhistle euphemism and coded language to twist and distort meaning. It’s not “white supremacy”, it’s “white nationalism”. Genocide is creating a “white ethno-state”. They support “identitarianism” instead of “Nazism.” And so on, and so forth. Imprecision and ambiguity in language is a key element of neo-fascist recruiting.

Third, and this is probably the most important reason, I’m an anti-fascist out of basic fucking morality. I might be dialing this down a bit too much but I think it needs to be said: It’s a bad thing to hurt and kill other people. I’m not trying to be facetious but considering some of the comments on Facebook these days it apparently bears repeating: It’s wrong to imprison people just for being different. It’s wrong to want to hurt people just for being different. It’s wrong to want to kill people for being different. Res ipsa loquitor.

Because ultimately that is what Nazis and fascists do: They kill. If you don’t fit into their vision of a perfect world, you will die. That is not hyperbole: They killed around fifteen million people they didn’t like the last time they took over a major industrialized country. Another fifty million or so died trying to stop them. The death and destruction laid at the feet of the Nazis and their allies is so vast we don’t even have accurate numbers, but even the most conservative estimates say that approximately 3% of our species died in that war. Fifteen million of those deaths were in the Holocaust, our name for the industrial murder or millions of Jews, LGBTQ people, disabled people, political opponents of the Nazis, and a dozen other “undesirable” classifications, years of suffering, grief and horror that we literally cannot imagine. And I do mean literally: the mind actually recoils from those images, those realities.

And these modern Nazis look at that death and horror and they see something good. They want in on that. After the war a number of original-issue Nazis tried to claim that the persecutions happened so gradually that they didn’t realize how bad it was going to get… until they did, at which point speaking up would have been fatal. Modern Nazis don’t have that excuse: they know exactly how bad it can get, they have access to the same historical records we all do; they just think they’ll do a more efficient job of it.

They think they can do a better job of it than the original Nazis. A better job of genocide. I’m not even equipped to figure out how someone can think something so repugnant, let alone act on it. But it’s not something you can work towards and even remotely be thought of as a decent person.

Fascism works by gradual degrees. It’s insidious. It’s deliberately insidious. Fascists know that if you drop people in the deep end without any buildup, they’re going to kick back. But if you can lead them down the path, step by step, then they’ve got you: There aren’t enough jobs for working folks. There aren’t enough jobs for working folks because of immigrants. Some of the immigrants are illegals. Illegals cause crime. We need to crack down on criminals and illegals. We need to lock illegals up. We need to put illegals into camps. If you object to putting illegals into camps then you’re a communist. We need to get communists out of positions where they can cause problems. We need to lock communists and dissidents up. We need to lock up anyone who causes problems. We need to clear out these crowded camps. We need to kill all the illegals and dissidents in the camps.

Fascists start from a basic premise — or rather, a series of basic premises — that many will agree with and then they keep pushing until people, normal, ordinary people who are probably decent enough and kind to their are agreeing with monstrous crimes. This is why we need to nip fascism in the bud. This is why, the instant fascism and fascistic politics rears its ugly head that people need to step up and resist it by whatever means necessary. As Mark Bray writes in Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook “You fight them by writing letters and making phone calls so you don’t have to fight them with fists. You fight them with fists so you don’t have to fight them with knives. You fight them with knives so you don’t have to fight them with guns. You fight them with guns so you don’t have to fight them with tanks.“

Last weekend in Hamilton, it became clear that fascists are sufficiently emboldened that they’ll attack anti-fascists in the streets, and then openly boast about it online, without fear of police reprisal.

It’s time for people to step up and resist fascism, because they’re already well on their way.