There's a storm brewing, dearest motherfuckers, or so I'm told. And I'm not talking about climate change. The wild wild world of the world wide web is ablaze with rumors, dark rumors, rumors told of a Fourth Reich, more than seventy years since the last one ran out of gas in the mucklands of Stalingrad. Fash is back and this time it's coming through the left door. There are reams of hysterical chatter across the mucklands of social media speaking of a diabolical collaboration between the far right and the far left. From Julian Assange robbing Hillary of her throne for Donald Trump, to Steve Bannon and George Galloway exchanging bro-hugs at a Eurasianist summit in Kazakhstan, to Glenn Greenwald getting chummy with Tucker Carlson on Fox News. It's a deep, dark, twisted, incestuous collaboration built on a shared comradery among crypto-Baathist Russophiles goosestepping their way to overthrowing the blessed post-war order of the Atlanticist brand of globalism we all know and love. And naturally that dastardly Kremlin puppet master, Vladimir Putin, is behind it all with his army of trolls and bots and other assorted shadow people. It's a dementedly elaborate conspiracy to lynch liberal democracy and here's the Shyamalan twist, apparently I'm the token tranny holding the noose.
For those of you who are less than familiar with my jagged, lip-smacking brand of drag queen satire, that first paragraph was a joke and so is this whole tired conspiracy theory of a new Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Some call it Horseshoe Theory, some call it the Red-Brown or the Red-Green-Brown Alliance (Just add Islamaphobia!), but that old feverish canard about a grand plot by the fascist right to infiltrate the far-left or vice versa has long been a favorite scare tactic of neoliberal centrists seeking to keep dissidents separated across their manufactured left-right divide. The desired result of this campaign is to keep conservatives and leftists too frightened of "infiltrators" to think outside of the ideological box while also keeping them dependent on the radical center to protect them from the ominous "other". Nothing scares the establishment more than working class unity, so the establishment turns this unity into a Polanskiesque horror story. Any leftist open to working with the right (like myself) is in danger of being linked to the worst excesses of white nationalism, while any conservative who refuses to spit on a hippie is blackballed as a dreaded National Bolshevik.
There is nothing new about this divide and conquer school of neoliberal strategy. I would expect it coming from those paranoid nitwits at MSNBC or the Southern Poverty Law Center. The scary thing about this latest wave of Horseshoe hysteria is that it appears to be infecting the radical left, thanks largely to the malign influence of Antifa. Originally founded as a loose collection of left-wing punks tired of getting curb-stomped by neo-Nazi skinheads, Antifa has devolved into an uptight squadron of watered down social anarchists who mostly busy themselves flexing their muscles and beating the fucking shit out of their peers in toxic masculinity in the alt-right. They define themselves as anti-fascists but, much like socialism, everyone seems to have a different definition of what fascism even is. Antifa seems to think it covers everything that offends their suburban, upper-middle-class sensibilities. Personally, speaking as someone who's always despised fascism, I see it as an attempt by the wealthy upper-class to hijack working-class populist rhetoric in order to use pissed off poor people to protect the endangered status quo that enslaves them.
The sick fucking thing is this seems to be precisely what Antifa has become devoted to. This country is way too goddamn complex for a single left-wing revolution to truly succeed. You will never see a communist Utah anymore than you can hope to expect a fundamentalist Vermont. Demanding Antifa's level of ideological purity is the surest way to insure that a truly stateless revolution is damned to certain failure. Historically speaking, what great American anarchist could ever pass Antifa's Hoity-toity purity test. Could Emma Goldman with her moral opposition to abortion. Or Edward Abbey with his environmental concerns regarding immigration. How about the great Alexander Cockburn himself who spent the last years of his life writing columns for that old-right flagship, Chronicles. Anarchy has always been about diversity and individualism because humanity itself is defined by diversity and individualism. The only way we will ever be able to conquer the state is if we provide stateless opportunities that can appeal to everyone, not just a handful of skateboarding hipsters on the coasts.
If Antifa has its way, anarchism will die a slow miserable death as a bourgeois fad or, even worse, become assimilated into the increasingly authoritarian status quo of the neoliberal west. This is a fate far more dire than the risk posed by largely-mythic nazbols, tankies and sputnik leftists in online chatrooms. More and more, everyday, Antifa is beginning to resemble the Red Guards, Mao's censorious and largely stateless student shock troops. If this growing virus of leftist paranoia continues to spread, we could be looking at a population that doesn't even require the state to be oppressed, a stateless police state. This is the stuff of Orwellian nightmares and this is one left-wing anarchist who will not sit idly by and watch it happen. I say anarchy is for everyone who rejects the state and embraces voluntary liberty, regardless of whether your adjective of choice is national or communist, syndicalist or capitalist. If that makes me a token fascist faggot, then so be it. Anything beats being a self-censoring, crypto-fascist, Antifa brat. And if that rubs you wrong, dearest motherfuckers, you can pucker up and kiss the queerest part of my fat tranny ass. I'm through stepping on eggshells and I'm not here to please you. Come and get me.
Peace, Love & Solidarity- CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post.
* Kick Out the Jams by the MC5
* (I Blame) Society by Titus Andronicus
* White Riot by the Clash
* Hologram by Tacocat
* Attitude by the Misfits
* Flag Pole Sitta by Harvey Danger
* Blank Generation by Richard Hell & the Voidoids
* Pinhead by the Ramones
* The Passenger by Iggy Pop
Yes, it appears that "fascism" is only fascism if it is positioned on the wrong end of the political spectrum. This is sort of akin to how, after WWII, France outlawed the Nazi party in order to fight fascism! The irony is deafening.
ReplyDelete"we could be looking at a population that doesn't even require the state to be oppressed, a stateless police state."
While this is always a possible worry, it seems to me that the State could never wither away except for the right reasons, i.e. the population's rejection of the validity of coercive violence. It seems to me that as long as there is a large contingent of people who embrace coercive violence, we will have a State in one form or another. And never confuse anarchy with disorder. Antifa is disorder, but it has not even one foot in the anarchist pond.
"Come and get me."
Not likely anytime soon. There are far too many advocates of liberty to arrest them all. What is most likely is that the State will try to make voices such as yours simply irrelevant, by having its sycophantic press corps and corporate milieu simply not even allow your ideas prominence in the discussion. Of course, once there is no longer any pretext of liberty and democracy, then yes, they will come for you, and me, and millions of others who have left an electronic bit trail. And I know you were speaking of Antifa, and not the State, per se. But they work together, one provoking the growth of the other.