fascism

I like Eurovision. I have very fond memories of Eurovision. I am also deeply pained by Israel's participation and Moroccanoil’s sponsorship of Eurovison. What to do with this? I can boycott, of course. Just not watch. Simple and just. But I also want to take a moment on what is lost. It's not just a fun and silly night with friends. It's the way that the global seeping horror of the neo-fascists steal our joy, how they corrupt and degrade our social spaces and interactions, how we are increasingly left with the no-win choice of staying or leaving (twitter, eurovision, the country, etc.) as everything feels icky and principals feel empty. So I can not watch. I can even come up with some counter programming with friends and have a joyous evening. But the next morning what will I chat about with folks at the coffee shop, the gym, the neighbor on the stairs, and all the other small human interactions that knit together the social web? I will have to explain why I didn't watch then. I will have to play all my cards and hope and even though the stakes are low (this time) suddenly I'm forced to play a game I maybe wasn't up for.

It's a hallmark of fascism, as opposed to just regular right-wingism, that it seeks to colonize and pervade the social sphere. Youth groups, sports teams, social clubs of every kind, are all subsumed, made complicit, tainted. And again, you can refuse, but I'm trying to highlight what that means. Sometimes it means clear consequences, like Stan Cullis getting cut from the team for refusing to give the Nazi salute in 1938 Berlin as part of the English national football team. But often it's quieter, the quiet separation from your neighbor, coworker, friends. Forcing that separation is part of the point, of course, forcing a constant you're either with us or against us system at every level of society, even—or especially—when the stakes seem low. All of which is to say I'm angry. I'm angry at this feeling that they are taking Eurovision—riotous, campy, pan-European, and just plain fun Eurovision—away from us and angry at the feeling of impotence that the most I can do is not watch. This is shit. This is bullshit. This is the fascism we face and that we have to deal with together.

I feel the need to add a small anecdote. I was a 12 year old kid living in Jerusalem when Dana International won in 1998. It was a big, huge, massive, deal. Already then, and even as a kid, there was a feeling that the ultra-nationalist religious right was taking over the country. Now, as an adult with a more sober analysis of history and ideology I can look back and say that already then, and already in 1948, and likely already before, it was too late and Zionism wasn't so much tainted as inherently shit…but I digress. In 1998, as a secular kid living in Jerusalem (but not from Israel originally, life and nationality are complicated), there was a real feeling that the enemy was the religious right. Friends were already thinking about the army and then you saw some Haredi kid across the street who would never have to serve. The politics of the day was dominated by Aryeh Deri & all that nonsense. Fights about Shabbat street closures regularly led to Orthodox Jews throwing rocks at passing cars.

And then…

A trans woman representing Israel won Eurovision! And singing in a Mizrachi style too! (kind of/sort of a similar dynamic to Lil Nas X making it big with a country song). And Jerusalem was going to host all that queer camp goodness with Dana at the center of attention! It felt really good.

After all that it's only fair that I give you with a glorious Eurovison entry, so here is Croatia from 2023 with ŠČ.

I should highlight one more thing: capitalism. Part of what makes boycotting things like Eurovision or the World Cup so hard is that while one the one hand they are owned and driven by monied interests, they also belong to and are given life by us, the fans, the community, the social relationships and connections that are the real reason we care about any of it. This goes back to what I was saying about how it's not just that it sucks to not enjoy watching Eurovision but that it sucks to not talk about it with friends afterwards. But it's worse than that because boycotting means facing up to the fact that we never really owned Eurovision to begin with—even though it's our love for it that gives it value. It's a bit (and I mean this in a hand wave-y metaphor way) like the worker who suddenly can't take the means of production with them when they quit. This duality is even more striking with football. It's absolute bullshit that the beautiful game has been taken hostage by FIFA, sponsorships, sports washing, etc. And it hurts that no matter how much we love, not just the game but the fandom, the community and the connections, that we can't just yank it back from the smug suites in the VIP lounge selling our passion to the highest bidder. We can build and support parallel alternatives, of course, but that doesn't entirely alleviate the pain.

In the violin world when people ask questions like “how do I maintain motivation to keep practicing?” the answer is: habits are better than motivation. Instead of relying on motivation or inspiration to hit, you should make a plan, have a routine, build the habit of practicing day in day out. Politics are the same. When folks ask "how do we get people to care?" the answer is: culture and ideology are better than individual feelings. Instead of hoping people feel moved to act on a specific topic we need to build norms, and yes, habits.

Part of the power of unions is inculcating that culture and identity of “we are union people, which means we show up in solidarity when shit goes down.” Part of the power of anarchism is that you have a ready ideological framework for understanding power and don't have to reanalyze every new situation from scratch. You know what side you're on. You know what to do. You’ve practiced this with your friends.

I know the pervasive Liberalism of our age makes many uncomfortable with this idea. A call for constructing “the human nature of the revolutionary,” or whatever, sound hopelessly outdated. People like to seem themselves as approaching everything with an open mind and thinking for themselves. But that’s a trap. Having the right “hot take” isn’t politics. That’s how you end up arguing about Musk’s Nazi salute is a true reflection of his interiority and whether to be kind to people who voted for Trump and generally feeling overwhelmed, paralyzed, and isolated.

When shit gets real you need to have community and habits to fall back on. You get there by building a shared culture of resistance where norms and practices have become not just second nature but, yes, the new human nature of the revolutionary.

I’m seeing a lot posts from folks in the US-sphere about how to “prepare” for the next four years. And they’re mostly good, (though, not entirely¹) and folks are right to fear what may come. For a lot of folks the coming years are going to be hell; let’s call that category 1. But, in a way, I’m more afraid that, for many nothing, will come at all, or at least only very little will change for them. I don’t mean the rich and racist who are salivating for future horrors; let’s call that category 3. I mean all the folks who with a small shrug and a bit of adaptation will blithely and happily continue along with their lives. This is category 2. The thing is, I strongly suspect that a lot of folks (not everyone; I’m not saying that at all) posting, reading, thinking about “preparing” actually fall into this second category, even though they might think they are in the first.

I think a lot of folks are going to be all geared and gussied up to fight fascism and then find that it has come in the night to beat up some folks in that other neighborhood (you know the one) and they at most heard some sirens in the night. I think folks are so focused on being prepared, on their own safety, on knowing how to react, on being the target that they’re going to miss the fact that fascism might not care about them all that much. A story my Grandmother used to tell was that after the war ended a neighbor a few doors down knocked on their door and said proudly (smugly?) “I knew what you were doing and I didn’t rat you out to the Germans.” and my Grandmother politely said “thank you” but in her mind was thinking “That’s the absolute bare minimum you asshole [I’m paraphrasing here]; that’s not being part of the resistance. That doesn’t make you one of the good ones.”

I’m not saying bad shit isn’t going to happen and lots of folks aren’t going to get hurt. That is definitely going to happen. But, well, for example. You’re book club isn’t going to pick Trump’s “Stories of True Patriots™”…but it only has 4 members. The local church, a nice normal church, might though because Lucy really wants to, and the President did ask everyone to read it, and what’s one book to stay friends with Lucy? You aren’t part of that church. What are you going to do about it?

I’m glad so many folks are interested and eager to think about the work ahead. I really am! And I’m not offering a full blown solutions here, which is a weak-sauce cop-out, I know. But I would like to offer one small correction and one small addition to the present discourse. First, yes be prepared but be realistic about what you—you specifically—are actually going to face. Second, to that end, look more closely at how historical and present day fascist and totalitarian states operate. Present day Hungary and India, recently Philippines and Poland, historically East Germany and Portugal are all good examples. Unfortunately there are many. The scenes that play in the popular imagination of jackbooted thugs smashing down your door and sending you to a camp to die the day after you dared say “the Leader is a poo-poo head” are … simplistic. Those regimes are/were scary and awful as fuck. But also more complex and janky than a Hollywood hero movie.

And now this post is starting to veer into what fascism actually is and isn't and how it's not just anything ultra conservative or any big shot who wants to be a dictator but a specific combination of the two that has love of Power (with a specific capital P) combined with a totalitarian outlook, and totalitarian not just in the political sphere but also the cultural, civic, and social sphere which I think we haven't seen play out in the U.S. to the same extent yet.

But that's not what I wanted to say today! I just wanted to say (tl;dr:) I’m glad y’all are thinking about how to prepare but just keep in mind they might not actually be coming for you, or even your next door neighbor, and certainly not necessarily in an overt show of force way and you should also be ready to handle a thousand soft choices while the black shirts are terrorizing that other neighborhood (you know the one) and do you actually know anyone over there? Because—and be honest with yourself about this—your neighborhood might actually continue unscathed for a good while yet. That’s one of the scariest things about fascism.

How do we keep going in a world full of unbelievable suck? The philosopher Walter Benjamin described history as “one single catastrophe that unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before [our] feet.”¹ Sounds like 2017 2024.

The question of how to keep going isn’t new. I imagine my grandparents faced it while in the underground resistance during the Second World War back in Holland. Of course, as Jews—and I believe they would say, as people of conscience—there was no alternative. Today we once again find ourselves in a historical moment where naked fascism is stepping out into the foreground of our collective psyche.

I hope we all agree that it must be stopped.

I keep hearing “We’ve beaten them before,” as though the military defeat of the Nazis in the second World War was the only time fascists were a threat. It wasn’t. For example, just ask the Spanish who suffered under Franco’s rule until the mid-’70s. Or, as if that somehow ensures the invincibility of “Western” Democracy forever. It really doesn’t. The truth is, there is no sure path, no eleven point listicle, to stemming the rise of fascism.

But what actually scares me the most these days is that when I wake up every morning the sun is still shining. Fascism, while apocalyptic, does not arrive with a swarm of locusts or a blood red moon, and does not lead to an inevitable showdown at high noon between good and evil.

The struggle against fascism cannot be reduced to a struggle for normalcy. For many—let’s call them ‘white men’, for short—normal may never be disturbed. And for others, “normal” has been shitty for a while now. To stand with the oppressed is a choice, a choice to actively put oneself into confrontation with the forces of fascism.

This is true at the grand political level; when Antifa faces off against white supremacists they are seeking out conflict because you can’t wait for the neo-Nazis to show up at your door. And it is true in our personal lives, where we must constantly interrogate our own beliefs and behaviors. Or, as the French philosopher Michel Foucault put it, the deepest enemy we need to defeat is “The fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”²

Personally, I cannot think of that confrontation without thinking of my grandparents and what they faced. My close friend Katie once described protest as a ritual to appease our ancestors. That makes sense to me. Of course I carry the memory of Oma and Opa with me everywhere. But, I hope to do more than appease them. I hope to complete their work.

I want a revolution, but not one driven by the desire for utopia but as a gift to the past. Revolutions break the flow of history. They rupture that progression of “catastrophe that unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble”.

I guess you could say I’m not wondering “how do we keep going?” so much as “how do we make it all stop?”

Because through that rupture we can reach back into the past. I know that the past can’t be fixed. But, it could be reoriented towards a new future, made part of a new story, and in so doing redeem all the struggles of our ancestors.

In the meantime, I wake up everyday and greet the still shining sun with a prayer:

Good morning. Today…
  I train my heart to desire revolution
  I teach my mind to think of love
  I shape my mouth to speak resistance, and
  I discipline my legs to stand in solidarity.

Because we must practice the world we wish to see.

A slightly different version of this was first published in 2017 as the backmatter to issue #4 of Steve Stormoen’s The Pros. This version, that I put here in 2024, has been lightly edited—mostly so that it makes sense without needing to have read Steve’s excellent comic.