Not a blazing hot take or anything, but interesting to note that the transgender-hating moral panic over Imane Khelif, and the racist+anti-migrant riots in the UK, have been triggered by completely fictional pretexts.
It is OK to choose your antifascist work based on personal risk levels. There are many non-violent and reasonably safe ways to help the fight at a distance, and those are essential work too. The frontline would never hold without the support of those working on the down low.
But if you invite people to go help with a blockade, don't go to the scene without a mask or black bloc gear, only to panic when the Nazis film you, and then flee the scene with your whole affinity group, leaving the rest of the antifa at a significant numeric disadvantage.
I don't want anyone to put their bodies in more danger than they're willing to. It's one thing to find yourself in deeper waters that you expected, and have that survival instinct kick in; most of us have been there. But if you're calling people to go stop a planned attack from known violent Nazis... What did you expect that they would do? What did *you* expect to do?
Please be aware of the risk you put the rest of the crew in, if you call on people to fight together, then leave them behind suddenly and without discussion. Be aware of the role you're applying to fulfill. Be aware that "fighting Nazis" is not a metaphor. When your 20th century ancestors said that antifa heißt Angriff, they were not speaking in metaphors.
USA people who are donating money to #MastodonForHarris rather than homeless people should listen to Corinne Green explaining how the Democratic Party has just thrown trans folk under the bus.
Trans people and immigrants in the USA: Both parties are fighting over one another to compete on who eliminates you the fastest. What are you going to do about it?
The other day I was in a rendezvous with some antifa from a small village and they were reporting on how one of the nazi groups sank their roots in the place, over the past five years or so. And it made me really scared. Not of the nazis, I'm not afraid of them, I'm not afraid of fighting them. I was afraid of their garden. That they have a garden.
After a lot of judicial disputes they bought a house, so they can't be easily evicted. They built a big communal garden, and they offer crafts and fighting classes for the youth, a direction for young men (be healthy, take charge of your life, be a fighter, fight for your fatherland), they run a festival… They're a part of the village now, you see them all the time, visible, unafraid of being identifiable, their indoctrinated children are in your children's classrooms, they're next to you on the football game.
We were talking about mobilising local resistance and they said that they tried, there's been (of course) demos, but locals are wary of building anything because of escalating threats and violence, in one memorable occasion they knocked on the house of a politician, talked to their children and left the child with a package with a death threat.
I.e. the nazis are doing all the things I wish we were doing.
@julieofthespirits While our side is too busy mobbing and ostracising one another because of online hot takes and interpersonal conflicts, their side has been making schools, farm compounds, shooting ranges. Setting up the alternative to neoliberalism—materially, ideologically. Unafraid of commitment, unafraid of being arrested or of exercising violence. And when I look at that I start thinking that I have to get better at finding meaning in the struggle itself, because I look at our disposability culture and think, how are we ever going to catch up…
The "political" in "political violence" is the same kind of "political" that's used of, say, any marginalised group getting the star role in a story, or any representation of gender variance, etc. It's the same "political" that @servo devs ban from their community.
The question is always, which type isn't "political" and why exactly?
a movement's explicit support for thieves, prisoners, sexual deviants, undocumented immigrants, squatters, and sex workers is a precondition for me to trust it in any way.
People who want to immigrate to run away from fascism, I immigrated to what I thought was a super advanced progressive woke land of freedom and ended up with nazis bashing my forehead with a metal bat, and now the same nazis are winning elections.
There's nowhere to run to. Life got much better once I stopped running and understood that *we* have the moral duty to bash *them*. Don't do my mistake, don't wait around until violence visits you, lead the violence to visit them first
say you want to actually do something actually effective about "abuse in our movement", you actually want to stop it from happening, you want to actually improve the lives of those hurt by it. you don't have to read a whole book by adrienne maree brown to know what that would look like; first of all your movement needs support structures—social, emotional, financial—for people who have been or will be harmed; you need mediators and educators; you need to take collective responsibility, look at past cases of abuse, figure out what sort of situations and structures left people vulnerable and how to change them; and so on; but all this is work. looking at someone you don't know making a sarcastic online quip about someone else you don't know and joining in with your own sarcastic quip _substitutes_ this work. symbolism and (loud, public) identitarian alliances replace the mess of doing things with neat binaries of right and wrong.
if you want to support the liberation of the working class you have to come to terms with the fact that a large part of it is right-wing, misogynistic etc. they still shouldn't be exploited by capitalists. no one should. if you want to abolish prisons, you have to come to terms that a lot of ppl in prisons are in fact abusers, swindlers, murderers etc. they still shouldn't be jailed. if you want to support trans rights you support trans rights for every trans person, including the terrible ones. if you want to run a rape shelter you must be prepared to shelter female MAGA voters etc. and if you oppose colonialism, then you oppose colonialism of societies whose ideology you disagree with. because none of it is about "deserving", the logic of "deserving" is a cover. the logic of punitive justice, dividing the world into innocent and unworthy, will always deflect responsibility from the systemic, and therefore serve power. this is after all the original excuse of colonialism: sure, it's bloody work, but that's a burden colonisers must take because Indians are savages, we're ultimately bringing about progress. Islamic ideology is misogynistic, therefore Gaza should be... well, cancelled.
or you can throw men under the bus and say that there can't possibly be a justification to kill tens of thousands of women and children (leaving unsaid the implication that every Arab man is suspected to be an abuser/murderer/etc).
but all those ripostes are red herrings, they accept the underlying assumption which is the moral blackmail of punitive justice: to be against rape means you want horrible suffering to be inflicted on rapists, and if you question that logic, "ah so you're opening space for abusers in our movement then"? set aside the fact that punitive justice has never remotely worked to actually stop, remedy, or prevent abuse, or any other social ill; set aside the fact that punishment is so easily coopted and therefore always weaponised against the most oppressed classes; the question at the core is the substitution of action for symbolic allegiance. because everyone is terrified of being ostracised forever in the Activist Offender Registry as an -ist, they have to jump at every opportunity to loudly and publicly denounce everything accused of the -ism.
still thinking about how every time they want to whitewash the genocide in Palestine it's always "but they raped Israeli women" or "but they're homophobic" or "but they would kill Jews if they had the chance". it's at a whole other scale, but the structure of weaponising cancel culture feels very familiar:
- you don't want to be _antisemitic_, do you? → you have to support Israel / bar Arab refugees
- are you telling me you're _pro-militarism_ / _pro-imperialism_? → you have to let Russia invade
- you support _feminism_, don't you? → you have to be a terf/swerf
- are you _against gay people_ ? → you have to be Islamophobic
and you can try to question the accusations, e.g. that Israeli reports on the actions of Palestinians have been shown again and again to be wildly unreliable so how can you know that those rape accusations are real. or you can try to tu-quoque it and say, what about the accusations of IDF soldiers raping women—backed by the UN etc. maybe you can Uno-reverse with an accusation of racism and ask, "if an Arabic majority was doing to a Jewish ghetto what Israel is doing to Palestinians, how would you react? if Russia slaughtered Dortmund because they harbours Nazis, would you support Russia"? ...
This was posted by documentary director Yuval Abraham after his speech at the Berlinale, which called for peace in Gaza, was demonised by German politicians and journalists.
In addition to what he's going through, it should be noted that the documentary is co-directed between Abraham (Jewish) and Basel Adra (Palestinian), and the latter is being erased explicitly--politician Claudia Roth went as far as posting on Twitter that her applause at the Berlinale counted only for the former.
It's not just that another Jewish woman (Hadas) was arrested in Berlin for a sign with the six-pointed star, it's that cops are doing this in name of "fighting anti-semitism." (the Star of David was coloured in Palestine colours.) I wonder how all this will look in the history books.
We all have noticed that they put the most racist cops to police the Gaza protests. They shout insults, humiliate you etc. And there is no reason why German racists would limit their bigotry to Muslims. They must be having a field day, getting to lock up and terrorise Jews in the name of anti-semitism, all while beating up pregnant women, teenagers etc.
At the protest in Bonn I saw a person taken for a sign reading "stop the second Nakba". This while Israeli commentators are openly calling for a second Nakba. lots more are being detained for signs or shouts calling for a stop to genocide. the logic apparently being that if you call what Israel is doing a genocide, you're denying the State's "self-defense" and therefore the unquestionable by law "right to exist". therefore protesting against genocide is a crime in Germany.
and what's heartbreaking to me is that most white leftists are on board with this. spaces and groups that I trusted all flying the "gegen jeden Antisemitismus" + Israel flag emoji...
"What is truly antisemitic is the equating of Zionism with Judaism": Jewish activist Rachel Shapiro arrested today in Berlin after her speech calling for a free Palestine.
"We stand, as a Jewish value, with the oppressed, always", is how she concluded her speech before the German police took her away.
Was at a Kurdish demo and the speaker expressed full solidarity of the Kurdish movement against the genocide in Gaza,
while also repudiating the Oct 7 attacks and acknowledging the Jewish objectors to colonialism and the need to fight anti-semitism,
and condemning each and every form of fascist organisation be it Turkish, Israeli or Hamas.
there. was that so hard? why is a commonsense position like this so hard to find in the German antifa. it's sad that clearly objecting to massacres has to feel refreshing.
I'm surprised at how big the reaction to the #AfD/Identitäre meetup is getting. I wonder if civil society wasn't really taking it seriously what has been obvious to us linksradikale from the start, that the AfD is nazis. Not "conservative", not "economic concerned citizens", not "EU sceptics". nazis.
I think there's something like a "reverse Stormfront" effect. The character in "The Boys", a celebrity who's a stealth nazi, has a quote that went viral online:
> "People love what I have to say! They believe in it! They just don't like the word 'Nazi.' That's all."
but in real life what I'm seeing is the exact opposite. antifa recherchers point out, this guy has friends in C18, in Legio Hungaria, has an SS tattoo, puts up 1488 stickers, quotes Mein Kampf--and nobody cares. People think either we're overly sensitive, or the nazis are "just larping edgelords", or it's "free speech best left platformed" (and, if you're the #Substack owners, give the nazis money too).
I guess it took a leak of a plan to ethnically cleanse Germany for most to realise that when we call them "nazis" we mean *nazis*. People don't mind the word "nazi" anymore. I think we should be more concrete in counterpropaganda.
I'm glad there's a reaction but keep in mind--the Pussy March was big too. #eleNão was big too.
@scrappy_capy_distro@tech_prole@aenea My point is that if you point at an individual German and say "hey you! yes you, this sucks! do more to include immigrants, be nicer! no one has the courage to actually do something other than demos here? come on people, los!", they just feel *more* privilege guilt than they already do, mutter awkwardly about being overwhelmed and "maybe you could try talking to xyz", then melt into a puddle of "mental health", never to be seen again.
(I tried.)
so our question became, how could we do politics in a way that makes first-world people feel like commitment, openness, insurrection is a way *out* of their private impasse. if they won't bother including us, how would *we* prefigure what we want. how do we show Germans by example that courage, humour, sentiment, adventurousness, mischief isn't just allowed in political contexts but *is* a politics, an energising politics, that French-style demos are way more fun. how to show that nothing is gained if everyone looks like this >:| all the time in plenums, that you can take a leap of faith and welcome a new person as if they already are the commune comrade you dream of, that why are you so afraid of losing this middle-class life if y'all hate it so much anyway.
@tech_prole@aenea@scrappy_capy_distro this is widespread enough to count as a systemic issue. it cannot be the fault of individual activists. if everyone is too scared to do anything, if everyone sees themself as irreparably too depressed/scared/weak to fight the enemy, there must be a structural reason.
we have come to understand the predicament of the German scene as something akin to an abusive relationship, with EU citizen / first-world privilege as the abuser. the privilege causes both privilege guilt and a (imagined) dependency to privilege, in a reinforcing, paralysing loop, making people terrified of losing a lifestyle they hate.
in other words, the system coopts the people it abuses by making them feel invested then guilty, like a good scammer. and in the process the first-worlders tear themselves apart from us third-worlders.
Queer Latina migrant in Europe. Anarchist antifa.Content note: fascists, fascist violence, and violence at fascists.into: rewilding, animal liberation, decolonisation, transformative justice.supports: EZLN, AANES/Rojava, end of Russian and Israeli occupations.opposes: Marxism-Leninism, tankies, swerfs, antideutsche.punches: fash.social: white privilege, middle class, noncitizen.avatar: a black kite with the anarchy symbol (by: Frente Anarquista da Periferia).banner: "anger in dignity: the challenge", by Masklin8 https://www.deviantart.com/masklin8/art/Digna-Rabia-El-Desafio-106884661#nobot