Sunday, January 24, 2021

You Can't Fight Fascism with Fascism

 January 6th was a day that will live on in infamy, or at least so I'm told. Maybe I've just become too jaded in my young age, but three weeks later and I still don't see it. The great Capitol Hill Siege sounds terrifying coming from some breathless dweeb at CNN but the whole thing seemed like a pretty second rate shitshow from where I was sitting. With the last gasp of Orange Man Bad, the Administration Who Couldn't Shoot Straight whooped up a few thousand devoted MAGA monsters with tall tales of stolen elections and sicked them on a congress playing democracy with the Electoral College. Shit got out of hand and some of the loonier tunes in the bunch invaded the building, chasing off our dear leaders and goofing around the hallways and offices until the pigs who let them in lost their patience. Five people died, which is always tragic, but most of the deaths were freak accidents that could have just as easily occurred if that many out of shape fogeys attended Coachella. I'm sorry if I'm being a dick but I just don't see this septuagenarian riot as being the new 9/11.

But that is exactly how the Washington politicos and their mainstream media hype-men are playing this. According to them and all their corporate think tank "experts," this thing was an act of terrorism. It was a neo-Nazi coup, and the next one is just around the corner. Speaking as somebody who actually kind of gives a shit about the civil liberties that these new Brown Shirts supposedly threaten, I'm far more concerned by the perfect synergy of the mainstream establishment's response to January 6 than January 6 itself. Within hours, the faceless scions of social media were launching sweeping crackdowns that banished far more than just Trump and QAnon from their pages. After a single patch was photographed on a Capitol Hill hooligan, the largely post-racial third positionists of the National Anarchist Movement were completely scalped from the internet. All of their Facebook pages were gutted like a carp and it turns out the asshole with the patch had been kicked out of the group years ago, precisely for his support of Trump and his fascist policies.

This was far from an isolated incident and the social media purge which is promised to just be beginning is only the tip of the spear. The talk from Washington is far more severe. On every news channel we see a bipartisan consensus on the need to pass sweeping legislation to crack down on the vague rising scourge of domestic extremism. Our new president himself is talking up his tough on crime credentials as he turns the Capitol into a dystopian police state, and this is one promise Joe is likely to keep. After all, he was the author of the draconian Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995 that his neocon homie, John Ashcroft, used as a blueprint for the Constitution shredding Patriot Act.

A lot of people on the left seem to be just fine with this shrill overreach as long as it's directed at their enemies on the right, but you have to be a goddamn fucking moron to believe that that's even going to happen. Apparently the progressive wokesters in the "Resistance" slept through their Black Lives Matter homework last summer. We already live in a goddamn white supremacist state. Every weapon you hand our gestapo in blue will be wielded overwhelmingly at Black and Brown people and their allies, from Antifa to Boogaloo. The only time our government ever takes the far right seriously is when they attack them directly, like at the Capitol or Oklahoma City. The rest of the time they could care less. And why shouldn't they? As long as Nazis stick to killing other poor people, they're just a bunch of violent imbeciles advocating for a white power that already fucking exists.

The most maddeningly insane thing about this whole sordid affair. The absurdity that would make even Kafka scream "What?!," is the fact that the specter of a largely empty suited fascism is being used to justify the real thing. If those asshats at the Capitol really wanted a Fourth Reich, they got it. Only it's Fuhrer Biden leading the jackbooted parade instead of Donald Trump. But we've been headed this way long before Old Joe even stepped foot into his first set of steel toes back in the late 1880's. America is and has always been an empire above all else, and fascism, as I see it at least, is the final stage of imperialism. The Caesars who inspired Mussolini used a heady mix of full spectrum militarism and statist mysticism in a last ditch effort to preserve the bad name of Rome as it collapsed beneath a colossal cross of war debt unto its own sword. Fascism is a syncretic monster by nature but it always acts as a desperate attempt to preserve the bloody vestige of a fallen nation's imperial greatness. We see it in the sanctification of the sacred Capitol and its godly Paladins. Only now it stands scarier than ever before because our desperate leaders have the new techno-oligarchy of social media at their full disposal. They've centralized the commons themselves and they plan to turn them into the world's largest panopticon. 

As a Queer Panarchist, this leaves me pretty much fucked. The whole basis of my entire belief system is that the only way for outsiders like me to truly be free is to let literally everyone choose their own possible utopia so long as it doesn't infringe upon anybody else's right to do the same. This would mean allowing even the imbeciles of the White Power Movement the right to open up their own knuckle dragging little communes and fail by their own merit. It's a philosophy that uses diversity and voluntarism to weed out the more authoritarian mental illness' by challenging them to put up or shut up. And if/when they finally step out of line and get violent, they have no excuses to fall back on when the rest of the communes come together to kick their fucking asses. Parler gets autonomy so if Parlor can't cut it, they've got no one left to blame but themselves, rendering their pseudo-free speech posturing laughably irrelevant like their half-assed ideology.

This is how a peaceful anarchist wins, and it involves supporting the rights of those we despise because we have faith that without the state they'll fail. This ideology has put me in some pretty fucking weird places. It's lead to me being threatened by fellow antifascists and anarchists like Antifa for my rejection of concepts like deplatforming, and it's lead me to make some equally unexpected allies on the right for my embrace of free speech absolutism. I have good friends involved with weird scenes like Boogaloo and National Anarchism. People I was told are bigoted terrorists turned out to be allies of my own debauched genderfuck riot parade. They didn't expect this outcome anymore than I did. But when you fight fascism with stateless liberty you bring the best out of everybody, including yourself. The state is the real enemy. Without it, fascism withers away into dust. Lets all make that shit happen and lets make it happen together.



Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH



Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post

* You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory by Johnny Thunders

*  Best of You by Foo Fighters

*  Youth Against Fascism by Sonic Youth

*  I Like Fucking by Bikini Kill

*  Nazi Punks Fuck Off by Dead Kennedys

*  Olympia by Hole

*  Sing Out by Cat Stevens

*  Shell Game by Bright Eyes

*  A Better Union by Titus Andronicus

*  Family Farm by the Hold Steady

*  I Feel It All by Feist

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