“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me. The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
~Alexander Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago)
“It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”
~ Various attributions, but probably a Danish proverb
“It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.”
“They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is.”
~Rebecca Solnit
***
Well, here we go. A slim majority of American voters have chosen to elect a textbook fascist. Where we go from here is a matter of speculation, which is rather pointless compared to preparation for a variety of bad scenarios.
I am not going to get into the issues that face various marginalized groups in this post. I will merely at this point note that I have the skin of family and friends in this, so it is not merely academic to me.
I will mention that the day after the election my wife found a poster up from a neo-Nazi group with “America is for Americans Only” on it - in our neighborhood. And there are already gravy seal sorts out in flak jackets with quasi-military patches on them. Shit just got real.
I also am not going to be giving away specific plans or ideas - all of us who still believe in basic human decency are going to have to find each other and work to preserve whatever we can.
I do want to talk about this blog, however. When I started it in 2011, it was merely a porting of my year-old Facebook notes about the books I was reading. And the blog still remains mostly an ongoing diary of my reading life, which is an important part of who I am.
Eventually, as the result of an argument with a former acquaintance over Doug Wilson (who appears more and more to be a Nazi), I wrote a viral post on the roots of Christian Patriarchy (and Christian Nationalism) in the white supremacist movement.
Soon after Il Toupee’s first election, I and my family left organized religion, and have not returned. While politics and religion are a relatively small part of my blog, my posts on those topics have resonated with a number of people. A small number - I am a tiny minnow when it comes to readership - or maybe a plankton.
In any case, if Il Toupee and the American Fascist Party (as the Republican Party has become) is looking for enemies or dissenters, I have already put a target on my back. Nearly 1500 posts over the last 13 years are ample evidence of who I am and what I believe.
Although, to be honest, there are over a hundred million of us who have at one time or another spoken out online. If there is strength in numbers, we have that, as long as we do not capitulate.
As the quotes above hint, while we can certainly see possible futures, we do not know precisely what will happen.
For one thing, Fascism isn’t just Hitler. It is Franco, and Pinochet, and Mussolini, and Bolsonaro, and Putin, among many others. While there are similarities, the way things played out has been different given different circumstances. Umberto Eco’s excellent long essay is very much on point.
Our particular situation is different from any other which has come before. For one thing, the US is deeply divided, unlike post-WWI Germany. We lefties (or who are considered lefties in comparison to the far right) have the benefit of hindsight in a way Germany never had.
This means we have a better opportunity to resist.
There is also the fact that enforcing widely unpopular laws is nearly impossible. Case in point is our failed war on drugs. Drugs have been winning that one since the beginning, and anyone who wishes to obtain them can easily do so despite our mass incarceration and broad criminalization.
If we hang together and refuse to do what the fascists want, and do what they do not want us to do, we have more power than we think.
Likewise, there is a difference between targeting roughly one percent of the population, and targeting essentially half of it. Or possibly more, given the intended war on women. The greater the number and percentage of people you have to oppress and conquer, the greater the costs of conquest, and the even greater cost of continued subjugation. As every empire ever has discovered.
As Solzhenitsyn notes, and Solnit confirms, the greatest weapon we all have is to refuse to accept the lie, to refuse to go along with the hate, to refuse to roll over and comply. The more of us do this, the more we can preserve, and the better our eventual chance of turning around this moment of collective denialism and delusion.
***
The future of this blog will largely depend on what happens in the future. Specifically, how far down the fascist hole we go. At minimum, I expect that free speech as the Founding Fathers intended (the right to express political dissent) will be limited, given the packing of the Supreme Court. How much right any of us have to criticize the Dear Leader and the Party is very much in doubt.
The easiest way, of course, is simply for Il Toupee to pressure his billionaire tech buddies to deplatform dissenters like me. This would not even violate the First Amendment, as it would be private action.
If we go to the extreme, we could see dissenters imprisoned or murdered, as Putin does in Russia.
On the hopeful side, the fact that I am too small of a blogger to matter - most of my posts are read by less than 100 readers, and even my most popular reach less than 1000 - may mean that irrelevance will insulate me.
***
I’m not much of a revolutionary. I’m not athletic enough to make a good soldier or guerilla. I’m not going to be literally punching Nazis - that would be either hilarious or a disaster…or both. I’m terrible at lying. I’m not good at conspiracy. I am not a natural leader. I wear my heart on my sleeve and say what I feel. I’m stubborn - just ask my parents.
My skills mostly include being organized, thinking things through (maybe overthinking?), working hard, and knowing a bunch of random stuff.
I guess I am the kind of man that women choose instead of the bear, but not yet sure how that translates to troubled times.
Really, the most I can do as one person to resist is not that much, although I intend to do what I can with the opportunities I have. What I do have is words. I am pretty good with words, if I flatter myself. I love teaching, and have generally been successful at that. More than anything, this blog is about education using words.
With my words I will refuse to participate in the lie. The lie that some people (particularly white American males) are inherently more valuable than others. The lie that humanity needs authoritarian power. The lie that hierarchy is necessary. The lie that we can continue to commit ecocide without it becoming suicide. The lie that what God wants is for us to murder each other over our differences. The lie that our problems are caused by the existence of “those people.”
My intent is to continue to write this blog as long as I can.
I may try to use euphemisms a bit more to make it harder for the algorithms to target me. (I already have had to do this with references to male genitalia and sexual slang.)
I intend to download the entire blog and keep it backed up on a hard drive rather than just the cloud.
If for some reason I am deplatformed, I am willing to keep readers updated. (You can email me if you want to be on the list.)
But one thing I do not intend to do is pre-comply. If all of us small voices insist on speaking, the resources required to silence all of us will be vast, and the ability of the fascists to silence us all more doubtful.
Do not take part in the lie. Do not be silent about evil. Care for the vulnerable. Everything we can save is worth saving.
Anyone know where they hand out the “Antifa” cards?
***
My suggested anti-fascism reading list:
They Thought They Were Free by Milton Meyer
The World That Was Ours by Hilda Bernstein
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death by Albert Camus
We Need New Stories by Nesrine Malik
A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit
A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan
The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill
(I’m sure I’ll think of more later.)
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