The Abyss Stares Back

Fascism is a tricky subject. Everybody seems to have a different interpretation of what it really means. Some people seem to struggle over the very nature of its existence; Whether it constitutes an actual political science or simply a phenomenon that occurs like a natural disaster in jackboots. Most people however just use the word like a rock to throw from the perceived safety of their glass houses.

Of coarse, being a bitchy autodidact with an opinion on pretty much everything, I have my own theories. I've always seen fascism as the final form of statism before a government collapses beneath its own weight, a desperate last ditch effort to salvage the unsalvageable with brute force. It usually involves the militarization of every facet of day to day life, the sanctification of the use of violence as a means of empowering the herd above the individual and an elimination of any existing boundaries separating big business, big government and the standing army they both require to exist in times of extreme turbulence.

If this all sounds frighteningly familiar then your probably an American and one of the few without your head surgically attached to the inside of your colon, so congrats on that. The bad news end of this paragraph is that America has never looked more fascist than it does right now. Unlike most leftists, I don't blame this entirely on Trump. The military-intelligence-police state has been rapidly expanding in this country for decades with Democrats doing more than their share of the work; Empowering the Executive Office to homicidal perportions and filling our prison plantation archipelago with waves of designated super-predators. But Trump is the cherry on top of the Reich, a hyper-nationalist demagogue who chums the herd with bucket-loads of fear and loathing while he hands the reigns of power over to a junta of decaying old generals ready to play this crumbling empire out to the apocalypse like a harp from hell.

The only thing more disturbing to me than the right's plunge into unveiled full-tilt military despotism is that the left in this country isn't too far behind. With the Orange Reich upon us, far too many people even on the far left seem to be mimicking their enemies on the right in a tragically foolish attempt to out-fash them with equal and opposite reactionary mob rule. We see it with the sainted thugs in ANTIFA, which I believe is Italian for ironic, steamrolling over any half-baked bigot like Brownshirts for practicing their right to free speech irresponsibly. You see it with the limp-wristed Millennials on college campus' across America who go running to authority figures like children every time they get their feelings hurt, demanding the sanitation of their sacred safe spaces by any means necessary. You see it with the new McCarthyites of the Democratic Party blaming every traffic jam or busted light bulb on the Russian bogeyman, Vladimir Putin and sliming anyone who dares to challenge the company line of the new Camelot they've found in Langley. And you see it in the dreamy eyes of young socialists so thirsty to find a demagogue to call their own that they'll gladly bow down to any drone strike imperialist who promises them free room and board.

We've seen this story before, or at least history geeks like me have. During the last rise of fascism in Europe many fine leftists found themselves turning to the red fascism of Stalin's Soviet Union. Many of these fine folks put their lives on the line as partisans in the Second World War only to find themselves tasting the ugly end of the people's stick in the Warsaw Pact or being abandoned all together in places like Italy and Greece, gifted by Stalin himself at Yalta to the new wave of NATO fascists operating under Operation Gladio.

Friedrich Nietzsche, a brilliant anarchist thinker often mislabeled as a proto-fascist by pseudo-lefty imbeciles, tried to warn us about this troubling phenomena when he wrote- "Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster....for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."

What I see in the left today is the abyss staring back and it haunts me like keffiyeh clad wraith. We need more Black Panthers and less ANTIFA. We need more Students for a Democratic Society and less snowflake social media warriors. We need more George McGovern's and less Al Franken's. We need more Murray Bookchin's and less Bernie Sander's. But more than anything we need leftists, real leftists, true leftists, be they anarchist, Marxist, socialist or libertarian, to commit themselves to smashing the state rather than empowering it with a red make-over. 

The only way to truly defeat fascism is to stomp it out in it's larvae form. To put it bluntly, America as we know it has gotta go. If not then lets just say here's looking at you Abyss.



Peace, Love and Empathy- CH



Soundtrack; Songs that influenced this post.

* Toxicity By System Of A Down
* Masseduction By St. Vincent
* Holland 1945 By Neutral Milk Hotel
* Hard To Resist By Bully
* Nazi Punks Fuck Off By Dead Kennedys
* The End By The Doors
* Youth Against Fascism By Sonic Youth
* Cherub Rock By Smashing Pumpkins
* Like A Rolling Stone By Bob Dylan
* Sugar By System Of A Down
* Dispatch From Mar-a-Lago By L7