Category Archives: Memoir

Back To Little Beirut

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Back in the late 1980s, in the embryonic days of the Coalition for Human Dignity,  together with a small group of student radicals I cobbled together something called the Antifascist Archives Project. It amounted to little more than a poster featuring a bundle of sticks with the blade of an axe protruding from the top being broken in half. The symbol is that of the fasces, the Latin term from which fascism derives. Together with our fanatic hearts and a pile of research files to inspire the breaking, we began ferreting out fascists wherever they might be, in whatever stage of development they had progressed, at whatever cost to ourselves. We operated from the second floor of a warehouse space located at 333 SE 3rd Street in Portland, Oregon known as The Matrix. From the beginning my antifascism always involved no small amount of rebellion.

Below our second-story ramshackle office was a tortilla chip factory where (in my mind’s olfactory eye) I can still smell those fresh tortillas cooking. After being cut into chips, they would slowly make their way down a small conveyor belt where they would be bagged and often consumed, hot and fresh, by yours truly. My memories of this collective space are bound up with the smell of those tortilla chips and that of another: the fresh ink that emanated from the giant offset printing press which periodically disgorged the finished broadsheets for the long defunct, and somewhat bizarre, Portland Free Press.

Fronted by Andrew Seltzer, the cantakerous and idiosyncratic editor and publisher, the newspaper had a short run of a couple years. I was listed on the masthead as “Staff Researcher”. In late 1989, I dug up a connection between the local top representative for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and government surveillance of the left. Seltzer told me to call the local FBI office for an interview, which I did. To my surprise, I was granted an audience with the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the Portland, Oregon FBI, a guy named Danny Coulson. Two of us marched up to his office and were allowed to record the proceedings (where is that tape recording?). We grilled him about the FBI’s Cointelpro (Counter Intelligence Programs) of the 1960s-1970s, armed with the accusation that such efforts to “infiltrate, disrupt and neutralize” the left were continuing, in particular around groups such as CISPES, (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador). I was young and well on my way to a political philosophy that does not appear on any conventional ideological map. The interview didn’t win me a Pulitzer, but it was an interesting peek into the top office of America’s Secret Police.

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The Matrix warehouse collective was a motley crew of antiracists and anarchists, Earth First! environmentalists and anti-gentrification activists (some of whom would burn to the ground a number of rowhouses being built by developer Phil Morford, and get away with it) antiauthoritarians who had stools alloted them at the Laurelthirst Pub, cop watchers and ACT-UP militants (some of whom I joined in occupying a federal office building more than once) anti-repression activists and numerous denizens of alternative music venues such as Satyricon and the Pine Street Theatre. The Matrix was a crucible for radical politics and an incubator for a subculture of resistance that would later be dubbed, “Little Beirut.” On more than one occasion I had a tasty meal procured from dumpsters at the back of a local grocery store. On other occasions, following rolling street brawls featuring Anti Racist Action and SHARP (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) activists fighting racist skinheads, comrades armed with shotguns and rifles patrolled the roof of The Matrix.

Around the same time I was interviewing the Portland SAC, my comrades and I were organizing the first protests against Dan Quayle and George H.W. Bush. The two would visit Portland over the next few years for a series of very expensive, very posh, private fundraising dinners, mostly held at the Hilton Hotel in downtown Portland. Chuck Palahniuk, by the way, doesn’t know shit about any of this, and neither do the scribblers at Willamette Week. Allow me to fill you in on a few details left out of these sanitized versions of what took place. First, the earliest of these protests were conceived, planned and carried out by militants in The Matrix collective. Get that right.

The symbolic protestors of Reed College who were self identified as “Reverse Peristalsis Painters” and who swallowed ipecac and food coloring so as to vomit in red, white and blue, were a sideshow, and came much later. The main events involved something quite different: gauntlets organized at two entrances to the Hilton Hotel, through which the well heeled Republican millionaires had to travel if they wanted to eat dinner. We disrupted the fuck out of that dinner party. Projectiles of all kinds–fruits, vegetables, eggs, rocks, etc., hit their mark. Cops were unprepared for the first two events, and rolling battles took place in the streets. I know, because I was there. One group of us dressed in the manner of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles–straight out of the sewers. What animated us was one main objective: raise the social costs of staging such events by interfering with the material capacity of the organizers to carry out such events. Symbols and imagery were secondary.

“Everything we want is in the end of you.”

That gauntlet, by the way, was what earned Portland the moniker ‘Little Beirut’, not the kids from Reed College and their ‘shocking’ performance art. And we threw all manner of projectiles, soiling the fur coats of the rich, burning newspaper boxes and cars. For a brief moment in time, at a few intersections in downtown Portland Oregon, the rich were on the run from impending violence. You don’t see that often enough.

History, as the saying goes, is written by the victors and they write whatever necessary to justify their continued dominance. Let this missive from a ghost of antifascism past be a token of resistance to that history.

Socialism, the great revolutionist Regis Debray reminds us, “was born with a printer’s docket around its neck.”

“Writing collectivizes individual memory; reading individualizes collective memory. The back-and-forth between them fosters the sense for history by unearthing potentials within the present, creating backdrops and foregrounds; it is fundamental for the idea of socialism. When it is cold outside and the night is long, memory means that we are not alone.” “Socialism: A Life Cycle” Regis Debray, New Left Review, No. 46, July-August, 2007.

For a new generation of radicals at the barricades I ask this: What happens to a society that no longer writes or reads, but posts and records in the manner of a compulsive self-documentarian? The selective timelines and creepy sanitized nostalgia of Facebook displace historical memory. Not that history by the victors was objective to begin with, but for every Richard Hofstadter or John Lewis Gaddis there is a Howard Zinn or an Eric Foner. Who shall replace them?

Socialism was born with a printer’s docket around its neck, and a molotov cocktail in her hand.

Long Live Little Beirut.

END

My Favorite Desert Island Band

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Audio Essay

00:00

Green Room

Siphoning gasoline from a bowling alley for your sorry-ass van stranded in a cornfield.

2:30

MacGuffins–That mechanism, often absurd, that sets the plot in motion.

2:50

Actors are cattle.

4:00

Punk rock ethos–Low production values, dirty, transgressive, subversive, no fucking talent.

6:30

“Boots and Braces”

8:10

“Nazi Punks Fuck Off”–Dead Kennedys

9:00

The “Scary fucking Nazi” is Kennewick Man

11:40

Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Austrauloid, Negroid. Fuck You.

13:10

My favorite Desert Island Band–Firewater

Caveat: Must include Cop Shoot Cop–the greatest name for a rock n roll band in the history of rock n roll.

END

When Ghosts Dream Of Angels—Part One

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As a ghost sent from the past into your world my presence involves no small amount of incivility. So much clanging about and reckless rage, while confined to dark digital outposts, still demands an audience, someone to haunt. In any case, it has never been your world, or our world, always their world. We were just thrust into it, and told to make our way, however difficult. So if my desperate whispers fall on your ears as so many dark forebodings, they also contain within them the possibility of another future.

Can a ghost dream? If so, what kind of dream would a ghost dream? It would be a dream filled with longing and regret, to be sure, but also, free from the past, a dream of reckless abandon, an imagination allowed to run riot. It is a dream that cries for a future free from an insufferable past and an intolerable present.

In this, the dream I dream is not unlike that cool and sardonic description of heaven as told by the character Belize to a fictionalized Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Twenty-five years after its first production the play is experiencing a welcome revival, no doubt because of scenes like this one:

 

 

I’ve taken the liberty to transcribe HBO’s version of Kushner’s play. Please pardon in advance my light editing and any errors.

Belize: “You awake? Can you see who I am?”

Roy Cohn: “Yeah. You came for my momma years ago. Wrap your arms around me now…”

Belize: “Who am I, Roy?”

Roy Cohn: (laughs) “The negro night nurse. My negation. Come to escort me to the underworld…”

Belize: “You want me Roy? You want me to take you away?”

Roy Cohn: “Oh, God I’m ready.”

Belize: “I’ll be coming for you soon. Everything I want is in the end of you.”

Roy Cohn:  “What’s it like after…this misery ends?”

Belize: “Hell or Heaven?”

Roy Cohn: He….(Roy trails off)

Belize: “Like San Francisco.”

Roy Cohn: “A City! Good. I was worried it would be a garden. I hate that shit.”

Belize: “Hmm. Big City. Overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catacorner to that. Windows missing in every edifice, like broken teeth. Gritty wind and a gray high sky full of ravens.

Roy Cohn: “Isaiah.”

Belize: “The prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary, like rubies and obsidion, and diamond colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths. And everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages and big dance palaces full of music, lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, mulatto. Brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain’t there. ”

Roy Cohn: “And heaven?”

Belize: “That was heaven, Roy.”

Indeed. Yet as Kushner has acknowledged, many years after publishing Angels, that future is not here, in San Francisco or anywhere else. Besides, even our most beautiful rebels, like Belize, are still, at best, changing the bedpans of the Roy Cohns of the world, rather than topping off that dose of morphine. Heaven must be conquered, brought into being, rather than received as a gift, upon surrender.

In order to dream a future at odds with the only one our present has on offer (the doctrine of TINA) one must identify who and what stand in the way of the realization of that future–one has to theorize an enemy, then a way to defeat that enemy. Kushner’s character Belize does this, and yet seems a bit too secure (smug even) in the notion that his heaven is the future.

Part of the problem, I think, is that smugness exhibited by Belize, so often on display by today’s liberals (think Rachel Maddow) and not a few historical materialists (Perry Anderson), reflects a belief that history is a necessary evolution, a slow but certain unfolding of ‘progress’, an arc always ‘bending’ towards justice. It is not. It just moves, hither and yon, not backwards or forwards. Where it moves and the quality of that movement is at least in part up to us. We may not make it move within conditions of our choosing, but move it we must.

Dreaming is a precondition for liberation; an essential rupture with ‘what is’, a reimagining of what is possible and and a fierce interrogation of ‘progress’. It is also essential for an effective anti-fascism.

In 1940, in the midst of a world-wide fascist explosion, just prior his suicide, Walter Benjamin said as much. From Benjamin’s On the Concept of History, Thesis Nine:

“There is a painting by [Paul] Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.”

All of our 21st century gizmos and widgets, all that seamless connectivity and disruptive productivity brought on by our gigantic mega corporations are entirely compatible with a neo-fascism now only in its pre-pubescent stage. Fascism is not the reemergence of some ancient bigotry from prehistory, it is one possible future asserting itself, and in this assertion another form of capitalism is being constituted. Behind the progress of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk is a craven figure who cringes and obeys for a piece of chocolate. That figure is us, unless we discover a way to bring about a rupture with that ‘progress’.

In an article on Benjamin’s eclectic anarcho-communism in Jacobin  (“The Young Benjamin”, Jacobin Blog, January 8, 2016)  Michael Löwy locates the failure to apprehend fascism within the evolutionary socialist tradition represented by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Löwy writes:

“An evolutionist conception of history, which believes in the necessary progress in the forms of domination, can hardly give an account of fascism — except as an unexplainable parenthesis, an incomprehensible regression ‘in the middle of the 20th Century.’ Now, as Benjamin wrote in his Theses, one cannot understand the meaning of fascism if one considers it just an exception to the historical norm which would be progress.”

Lowy notes that “Benjamin understood the 20th century as one of barbarism and modernity — an interconnection which would take, a few years after his death, the catastrophic figure of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.”

War is coming; and with it the soil within which fascism grows is fertilized.

END

 

 

 

 

 

Antifa Spycraft

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Antifa Emblem

I probably cut an odd figure in my Carhartt Washed-Duck Tool Pants, black Thrasher hoodie and industrial neoprene gloves. Waist-deep in a dumpster I am making a fashion statement of sorts, wading through the quotidian refuse of an office park: coffee grinds, fast food containers, styrofoam peanuts, cardboard boxes, used printer cartridges and, much to my chagrin, the occasional dirty diaper. It’s 1990 and my comrades and I are ‘dumpster diving’ out in the suburban sprawl of Portland, Oregon. But it is neither food nor saleable commodities we seek. We are churning through garbage in search of the political droppings of a far right organization housed there. The take from this ‘trash cover’ (to use a term of the trade) could help neutralize a far-right group, or at least make less effective their attacks on vulnerable communities. After a few night’s worth of applied garbology–Disco! Reams of perforated computer paper reveal detailed membership lists. We don’t have time to do anything other than scan it–the headings confirm it is from our target–so we bag the loot and skidaddle.

Your trash, my treasure–asshole.

From there the black garbage bags are transported to a warehouse where the really difficult slog begins. We spread out a large tarpaulin and separate the wheat from the chaff. What we call raw, primary data–everything from membership rosters to post-it notes, utility bills to grocery lists–is sorted and prepped so as to be of some use. Then we feed the raw data into already existing databases and files, cross referencing it to identify matches and points for further analysis. In other words, manual data entry is how we transformed data into information (no shortcuts from analog to digital back then). If we do our opposition research well, that information can reach its final form: actionable intelligence. For instance, the computer printouts provide detailed information on the targeted organization’s supporters–donation amounts, addresses, phone numbers, occupations, etc. Some of those donors may not want their identities released to the public. We do. Likewise, the discovery of internal memoranda can provide a window into a group’s organizational capabilities, relations with other political formations or even internal dynamics, such as factional fights, that we can exploit. Finally, a report can be generated and the findings ready for dissemination. Then it’s back into the dumpsters and the process repeats itself. From data collection to information analysis to actionable intelligence.

Our fashion statement is also therefore a political statement.

In all of this our team of researchers were practicing a form of ‘para politics’, i.e., political conduct apart from voting or demonstrating, polling or political speech. There are other, less charitable meanings associated with this term, but I am employing it here in a relatively value neutral manner. This is, of course, the province of the Antifa. For our purposes here, let’s call it Antifa spycraft.

If my late-night shenanigans of decades past often yielded material for critical print, radio and television stories on the far right, they also often helped communities better protect themselves from attack. In this case, our information helped ‘out’ more than a few ‘down low’ bigoted businesses and politicians. Oh, and it was legal. In many locales, the laws around trash collection are often ambiguous. In this case, because the material we absconded with was in a dumpster, it was no longer private property. Likewise, depending on your locale, once your garbage can is out on a sidewalk or street, it may be free for anti-fascists–or fascists, for that matter–to rummage through. This low tech tactic of opposition research–today’s equivalent of hacking someone’s digital footprint–was a time-honored weapon in the Antifa arsenal. But not the only weapon.

If back in the day we had a ‘trash cover’ on an enemy political group, there was a good chance we also had an infiltrator attending meetings and other activists taking down license plates and shooting video and photos of their events. Much like the shitheads at Project Veritas and Brietbart News do now, but long before those clowns were selling their hack jobs to their paymasters, we pushed the limits of acceptable political engagement. Today, effective anti-fascists, especially those grouped around Rose City Antifa and It’s Going Down, as well as activists featured in Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook understand this. It’s well past time to have a debate with those socialists and other radicals who don’t seem to get it.

That the political tradition and contemporary efforts of the Antifa are valuable, even essential, to the broader socialist struggle is not accepted by all comrades. In spite of an honorable and effective history, there are left radicals who not only dismiss this work, but denigrate those who practice it. Quite a few regard the most militant and therefore visible actions of the Antifa as anathema to our broader struggle. Many misguided socialists prefer to ignore this vital work or, when such intelligence is used by an Antifa fighting force, such as in Charlottesville, raise cries of ‘adventurism’, perhaps laced with a quote from Lenin on infantile disorders.

But if you ask this old ghost there is nothing more infantile than attacking the work of comrades you know next to nothing about; except, perhaps, doing so from a Marxist theoretical framework so sclerotic it can regurgitate that fatal stupidity all veteran anti-fascists are familiar with: “The enemy is not fascism as much as it is capitalism that exploits the working class according to democratic and civilized norms that would never be associated with the swastika or other fascist regalia.” (‘Antifa and the Perils of Adventurism” by Louis Proyect, August 15, 2017. My emphasis). Proyect, whose nom-de-chair is The Unrepentant Marxist, slanders antifa activists when he’s not busy digging himself out from under all the free dvds (he never tires of letting us know) tinseltown sends him for film reviews.

He goes lowest when addressing the street battles between anti-racists and neo-Nazis that took place in Charlotesville last year.

He writes, “Turning now to Charlottesville, it is obvious to me that if the protests had been disciplined and under the control of marshals such as was the norm during the Vietnam antiwar movement, there would have been much less of a chance that James Fields would have been able to drive his Dodge Challenger into a crowd, killing a young woman and injuring 19 others.”

Here Proyect is laying the death of Heather Heyer at the feet of the Antifa, instead of where it belongs, with the neo-Nazi who ran her over. Elsewhere he refers to Antifa activists as ‘boys’ engaging in ‘childish acting out’. And unruly boys need discipline, don’t they? Proyect apparently wants cops, in the form of movement ‘marshals’, to get them back in line, with a spanking, if necessary. This bit of scolding he digs up from his glory days in the abject failure that was the Vietnam antiwar movement. But the important lesson of Charlottesville is completely lost to Proyect, which is in the role the Antifa played in protecting religious pacifists from attack. Cornel West testified to this development, something that should be built upon. Leftists with integrity, who know when to shut the fuck up when they are out of their element of expertise, should support the Antifa, not hang them out to dry.

What Proyect does not understand is twofold: the nature of neo-fascism in the 21st Century and how a corresponding anti-fascism, to be effective, must be somewhat different from other forms of protest and organizing.

By definition Antifa organizing must contend with vigilante forms of attack–those that have their origins largely outside the state repressive aparatus. In other words, fighting racist assholes is not the same as going door-to-door collecting signatures for a ballot initiative or candidate, much less reviewing the latest art house cinema production.

The hinge that supports the door through which all revolutionary antifascists must pass–from a coherent definition of fascism to a retooling of anti-fascism–is intelligence, by which I mean spycraft. There is no substitute for knowing your enemy, preferably much better than they know themselves. No one else will do it. Cops reduce everything to their bailiwick: criminality. Reporters personalize the far right, always looking to sell a story. Academics do post-mortems with an eye towards predictability–usually unconnected with the flesh and blood Antifa struggle and therefore too little, too late. Liberals wring their hands about free speech and fumble about for that phantom limb within the democratic party that might deliver them from ‘hate’. Anti-fascists are the only political force intent on destroying both the conditions that continually regenerate fascism as well as the recurrence of the fascist plague itself.

This role can only be successfully carried out by anti-fascists who employ measures of antifa spycraft against our enemies. One cannot gain this critical advantage through anything other than counter-intelligence: no amount of long-form analyses of the falling rate of profit or the changing demographics of the working class will tell you this and it cannot be divined through oracles–whether in the form of tea leaves or data science. Anti-fascists must have the ability to infiltrate neo-fascists both to disrupt and neutralize their efforts and to protect communities they attack.

How to do this begins with a counterintuitive hidden in plain view. The state, law enforcement in particular, is governed by a set of regulations that are not the same as those that govern citizens and many others. People can engage in intelligence gathering in ways that are often (though not always) rendered problematic for a cop or official. Furthermore, the person of interest to an antifa spy is often not a public official but a private citizen, perhaps a public figure, in many ways more open to surveillance and their networks thereby to penetration. This also applies to the civic and political groups a far right activist works with. While it may be quite beyond the technical capability of an antifa activist to hack the confidential informant records of a local cop, it is certainly within their capability to wade through the trash of a local fascist.

Today, many Antifa groups continue in this same tradition with detailed, publicly available and actionable intelligence on far-right activists–mug shots, addresses, workplaces, quotations, etc. Furthermore, contrary to claims that it’s too expensive and/or complicated to practice spycraft (leave it to the professionals!?) amateur spies are essential to the Antifa. Another way to think about this is that the type of struggle the Antifa is engaged in will in large part determine its methods, much like clinic defense organizations have long utilized opposition researchers in their work defending clinics against the anti-abortion movement, especially when they cannot rely on the state to do so.

It should be obvious that fighting the far-right is not the same as fighing corporations or the state; and the Antifa is not synonymous with the Black Bloc, another elementary distinction that eludes Proyect, but will have to wait for another time.

To continue, a cop generally has to have ‘probable cause’ to search through someone’s garbage and will likely be required to leave a paper trail (digital footprint) of their activity. In other words, because of the oppositional nature of much of the far right–the fact that it occupies a contradictory relationship with the state, often outside of it and even opposed to it–forms of anti-fascist resistance can penetrate it by different means. Opportunities for disrupting the far right present themselves in ways that organizing a union drive at a multinational corporate factory do not, and, also, that creative intelligence work can provide the basis for work between communities that might not otherwise work together. This doesn’t, of course, mean that elements of the state don’t overlap with the far right (after all, Donald Trump is president) but that anti-fascists need to take the threat of their activism seriously.

In my experience the value of anti-fascist work was always best determined in close consultation with other radical groups and communities targeted by the far right. In “Death to the Klan” and Armed Antifascist Community Defense in the US (It’s Going Down, July 26, 2016) there is a useful review of such efforts in Portland, Oregon during the late 1980s and 1990s.

“…[groups] like the Red and Anarchist SkinHeads (RASH) and the SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARPs) found themselves in frequent battles with neo-fascists converging on Portland. A group called Coalition for Human Dignity (CHD) activated not just to beat back the onslaught of skinheads, but to transform racial consciousness in Portland. They used the strategies developed by ARA [Anti Racist Action] to expose and shame skinheads wherever they showed their faces, getting them fired from their jobs and evicted from their apartments. However, when skinheads began to harass local members of the community, attacking their houses and cars, CHD devised a decentralized community self-defense strategy.”

In the same article an old Portland comrade of mine, M. Treloar, is interviewed by It’s Going Down activists and elaborates:

“There were several situations where our people who had concealed weapons were confronted by groups of boneheads and either pulled the weapon or made it clear that they were armed and the boneheads backed off…There is no doubt in my mind that in several instances they would have been attacked, since we had people who were taking down car license plate numbers, staking out houses or infiltrating gatherings.”

“The CHD mobilized to form a media defense position, which helped generate positive public opinion….What’s notable is again the people who attacked the boneheads after a certain point did very little time, and were generally hailed as heroes in the community…”

From very early on the work of the Coalition for Human Dignity in Portland, Oregon (I was a founding member) targeted the social base of neo-fascism: white nationalism and the Christian Right. This definition intentionally cut across class lines–rendering racist reaction as neither the exclusive rotted fruit of the ruling class (capitalism releasing fascist antibodies to protect itself) nor principally the unresolved grievances of a white working class left behind by captialist development (two fairly typical myopic explanations of the re-emergence of the far-right.)

Back then, much as today, the issues of choice for far-rightists were anti-black and anti-latino racism and homophobia. It should be noted that at this time (1980s-1990s) the two main political parties and all statist anti-hate groups (SPLC, ADL, etc.), scrupulously avoided homophobia as a political issue and did not include bigoted elements of the Christian right nor anti-immigrant groups within their definition of ‘hate groups’. It was radical LGBTQ and fight-the-right activists who pushed them to do so by being more effective than they ever could be. But, nonetheless, organzing in the early nineties had to contend with the routine dismissals of the Christian Right as backwoods hicks, neo-Nazis as cults and criminals and racist skinheads as yet another counter-cultural youth rebellion, all destined to pass–if they hadn’t already–into the dustbin of history. But they didn’t, and neither did we. So many premature obituaries of the Paleo-conservatives and the Christian Right have been issued and reissued since then that it is staggering to consider not only their continued relevance today but their central role in the Trump electoral victory, and how spectacularly wrong those analysts were about their political prospects.

Many months after Trump’s victory, in a series of articles for Catalyst, Jacobin and New Left Review one of the most astute Marxist analysts today, Mike Davis, finally got around to noting the confluence of white nationalism and the Christian Right in Trump’s victory.  That it took so long for the socialist left to make this observation is disturbing and highlights the fact that if anti-fascists lack the theoretical sophistication of New Left Review contributors, they more than make up for it by actually fighting fascism and capitalism, rather than just writing about it, after the fact.

On the other hand, if antifa groups want to have a say in how to oppose fascism, theoretical clarity is certainly important. The reason the best anti-fascist fighters have always come from socialist, anarchist and communist traditions is because they understood the first principle of anti-fascism: fascism is our mortal enemy, and must be fought.

Saying as much need not always involve alliances with liberals and conservatives that necessarily mean capitulation to those forces. If one has a decisive advantage in intelligence, it can be used to establish the political parameters of such alliances or agreements. If, however, antifa groups do not have an ‘intelligence capacity’ they will cede the right to effectively fight fascism, and thereby protect communities under attack, to others. That right, by the way, is earned; sometimes in a dumpster.

War Crimes, Lady Liberty and Values Voters

05 Monday Aug 2013

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War Crimes, Lady Liberty, and Values Voters 

2005 (re-edited August 2013)

When the muse of history looks back on the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, her countenance frozen in shock and awe at the sheer audacity of the lies, the tragicomic credulity of the American public and the utter absence of reason in any of it, she will write of the moment an American GI refused to drive a Hummer without armor as the beginning of the end of this sordid affair.

Ma History will note the courage another soldier displayed in choosing conscientious objection over a second tour of duty in Iraq. And then she will weep for the 100,000 bombed into oblivion because of an illegal, immoral and criminally stupid invasion of the land of Eden. She will not write of the 3,000 murdered in New York, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia some three years ago. Why? Because that act of monstrous evil had nothing at all to do with this carnage, and has its own, separate volume.

It’s also true enough what they say: power yields not to facts, nor reason, nor right, nor the public good. And while it remains to be seen whether ‘W’ will have to pay the piper for stuffing the square peg that is Saddam Hussein into the round hole that is the so-called ‘war on terror,’  for now might makes right.

But we will all pay for this one.

This is a morose habit of mine–watching the spectacle unfold with unbridled disgust and fury. The response I often receive is the cooing of the pendulum theory of history. You know, history repeats itself, endlessly swinging to and fro, in comforting, concentric circles. Somehow, I am supposed to take comfort in the idea that soon the pendulum will swing back.

Everything balances out.

But even if one were to accept this notion of plus ca change, it deliberately misrepresents the idea that while the pendulum does swing two and fro, it’s fulcrum may move to the right or to the left, leaving the path of the pendulum swinging over different terrain. Besides, the pendulum notion suggests another classical allusion that has also long since been shorn of any meaning through over- and mis-use: that of Lady Liberty holding the scales of justice, keeping in balance the counterweights of American jurisprudence: presumption of innocence, weighing of evidence, the dispensing of justice, and, of course, vengeance.

But I don’t take comfort in the pendulum swinging back because I no longer recognize the terrain over which the pendulum of history swings. That landscape has become increasingly barren and bereft of hope such that the part of history endlessly repeating itself seems to be the murderous and cruel part.

Lady liberty remains blind, but that just means she is unaware her scale is corrupted. She is now incapable of weighing in a fair manner the souls in the balance; her gaze is now permanently fixed on tabulating and re-tabulating the 3,000 or so Americans murdered on September 11, 2001. She considers the 100,000 (or so) dead in Iraq, [2005]–a result of the most egregious war crime one can commit, that of one sovereign nation invading another without just cause–to weigh less than those 3,000 lives lost in spectacular, jumbo jet-cum-missile fashion. If she was actually weighing anything of any consequence to humanity, if whatever she has been doing with those scales had anything at all to do with justice, the President of the United States would be tried as a war criminal. That’s the hard truth of the matter.

Some lives, then, are worth more than other lives. That principle is alive and well in American jurisprudence. You can see it at Abu Ghraib in the now infamous photo of the Iraqi prisoner standing on a crate, his arms out crucifixion style, hooked by wires at the fingertips to an electrical shock machine, his head covered by the capuche, or hood, so popular throughout Latin America for the past four decades. All this is instantly recognizable the world over as the dress code and pantomime of Imperial torturers.

The reverse is true as well: the United States policy of not allowing photographs of dead American soldiers, in or out of coffins, is to deny that American soldiers die at all, their lives so precious that we cannot even be allowed to see their lifeless bodies. So you can show an Iraqi being urinated on, hooked up to a torture machine, but you won’t show an American soldier in his coffin.

What do you glean from this?

This principle, that American lives are worth more than others, that we are an exceptional country, is a principle absolutely anathema to a functioning democracy. It is toxic to core values of justice and equality and it follows from a relativistic notion of ethics in the world: you know, we can do whatever the hell we want because they suck worse than we do.

America, love it or leave it.

But you can accept this from a realist (relativistic) manner; or you can continue drinking the Koolaid–actually believing in the content of the fabrication. Either way, we have become incapable of recognizing the unique humanity of other peoples.

I am not undergoing that classic American epiphany; the one where the man of conscience wakes up in the middle of the night with the terrible recognition that their government tells lies. I am no apostate from the American Dream; I never believed in it to begin with. I am a heretic. So I don’t experience that disorienting sensation of a fall from grace.

What gets me, what seems new this time around, is the utter oblivion that one is consigned to when you point out these seemingly irrefutable, common sense truths. That seems to be novel. That’s my epiphany. I mean, I never felt entirely in the wilderness in the 1980s and 1990s. But now? Trees are falling in the woods, I hear them, I even see them falling; but seemingly no-one else does. They didn’t fall, I guess. What’s left of the left is as irrelevant as it has ever been in the history of this nation. I know, there is Michael Moore with his jocular and populist anti-corporatism. But really, he is going to lead us in storming the Winter Palace? Will he provide the rope to the plutocrats with which they can hang themselves?

I don’t think so.

The pendulum pushers are those people who believe that when things get worse it just means they are about to get better. Meh. I’ve always thought this position, so popular among American progressives, reflects as much analytical subtlety and wisdom as the rallying cry of those German Communists who, just prior to Hitler being named Chancellor, took to the streets shouting “After Hitler, Our Turn!”

We know where they ended up.

Democrats may yet find a way back to power, but I am reminded of a mirthful query I occasionally toss up to my meat-eating compatriots: If, after decades of interbreeding and biological engineering the gene pool of the modern chicken is so fucked up that the fight or flight instinct has been bred out of the animal and it greets foxes with a merriment previously reserved for roosters; if, after so many generations of existence in a tiny cage it can no longer fly; if, after so many lives lived in complete darkness it can no longer see; and, if the thing increasingly eats its own young, then tell me, is that thing you eat, that thing you call a chicken, really a chicken? Or is it something else, something that requires a new name?

The battle cry for Democrats to ‘reconnect’ with values voters sounds like the feeble cackle of the modern ‘chicken’ embracing its natural predator.

A mobilized and active population will characterize the early phase of all fascist movements. Authoritarian regimes, Caudillo-style plutocracies, European monarchies and other dictatorships of all stripes do not, as a general rule, like excitable, mobilized populations. They may fight a war—as did Argentina against Britain, Iran against Iraq, etc., but these ventures are a sign of weakness, and it seems to me such activities usually  involve the undoing of such regimes. One has to consider how much worse racist attacks could have been in the United States post-September 11 with a mobilized population, rather than a nation of ‘reality television’-watching, McDonald’s eating, Hummer-driving, xenophobes.

I guess I should be thankful.

The current trend towards an electorate evenly divided and deeply polarized could very well portend the early stages of just such a population ‘waking up.’ Fascism, in its fetal stage, is dynamic and requires an active, autonomous, mobilized segment of society. It must have an alchemical, volatile mixture of ideas and activity on which to feed. The Republicans do not yet have a grip on such ideas, trapped as they are with the mutually exclusive goals of maintaining, extending and deepening their institutional power but also mobilizing a constituency that is increasingly hostile to such a project–their elitist leadership vs their base.

Ironically, it is within pluralist democracies that one will find the most fertile ground for the development of a full-blown fascist movement. This resolves the seeming conundrum of why Weimar Germany, the polestar of western, democratic societies of its time, would descend into fascist barbarism. The liberalism of the Republic provided the necessary, if not sufficient, groundwork for the incubation of the Nazi movement.

One could argue that there would be no need for fascism in America—liberal economic policies and an individualist moralism at home and abroad provide a modicum of stability; the siphoning off of profits from the third world channeled into stabilizing the social contract at home. While this may be true, it misses the point. It’s not whether America ‘needs’ fascism or not. The question is under what conditions does it becomes possible, plausible, likely or even inevitable?

How about under the current conditions within which we live? I think it is about time that progressives began to seriously ask the question: what is coming down the pike? If you think that we already live with a fascist government, then you and I have nothing to say to one another–because it isn’t. Assuming then, that whatever is coming is taking shape as I type, and it probably won’t be good, we should discuss how to stop it.

One could argue that the time to snuff out an incipient fascist movement is right then, in its infancy, right now. However, even this is probably too late. The better allegory is that of an abortion because in all likelihood fascism only becomes possible, its infant stage only realizable, after opposition movements have already been defeated. In other words, it wouldn’t be conceived at all if opposition had been strong enough to begin with. It’s necessary to turn the old (disastrous and wrong) leftist diagnosis of fascism on its head. Instead of fascism born as a reaction to the threat of progressive victory (the most common variant of this argument is that a segment of the ruling class will turn to fascists to protect itself against the threat of the left or, in its most infantile formulation, fascist movements are considered to be headless aggregates of disgruntled criminals fighting and dying for their capitalist masters, the latter secretly pulling the strings to achieve higher rates of profit) fascism is born in the ashes of the failed revolutions of the left.

In America, was the birth of fascism in the early 1970s when the civil rights movement and all the other progressive movements formed around it, lost? I know that’s counterintuitive, because most people, even progressives, are accustomed to speaking of the triumph of the civil rights movement. But I disagree. What, really has changed in Black America? When you break that down it all looks like the failure that it really is–most specifically for Black people, but also for most everyone else. No, the specter of American fascism feeds, and grows stronger, on the desiccated corpse of a union movement that today represents all of 13% of non-public workers. It grows stronger because the most promising civil rights and liberation leaders were assassinated in the 60s and 70s, the remainder of the movement jailed and beaten, commodified and gentrified into leisure rebellion and pseudo integration, into a retreat deep within the urban enclaves of crushing poverty, social Darwinist triage care, de facto disenfranchisement and a reactionary right wing business class.

The vultures of fascism are getting fat on the carrion. If anyone had bothered to hazard a passing glance at the mad copulating going on over the past 30 years between Christian conservatives, free market parasites, militia types and national security state operatives–a perverted union, the kind that can produce a fascist baby–if someone had seen this act of brutal, loveless fucking for what it was, then perhaps the parents could have been dispensed with. But alas, I fear we already have the prodigal son running around among us. And now he may be too strong to kill. Perhaps it’s time to run to the hills. I’ve heard Canada has mountains.

Fascism feeds on feeling states. It is always tribal and will concoct an imaginary heroic history from which to project an hallucinatory moving picture of the future. Fascism is the quintessential celluloid creation. This is why arguably the two most influential films in the history of cinema are both (proto)fascist films: Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will. Fascism in its movement stage seeks to supply an answer for that deep, collective yearning we all feel (some of us more than others) for community. In this age of digital anomie and multiple identities fascism supplies an answer to the question, ‘who am I?’ Fascism offers itself as profoundly solid and compact in contrast to rapid and inexplicable economic and cultural change (globalization, etc.) and demands that people be willing to fight for an alternative vision of the future. In fact, the very act of fighting is how the collective identity of a fascist movement is forged.

The esprit de corps of fascism is forged in the flames of war.

With the ‘War on Terror’ this country is now permanently at war. And now we have a demographic—the values voters—that wants a new beginning. These largely white voters constitute a self-aware group of people who want to be ‘born-again’ in the dung heap of its national mythology; a group of people whose own religious experience dovetails in a remarkable manner with that of classic fascist activists; a population that is ready to fight against the elites who have betrayed them (wait for this crop of ‘War on Terror’ veterans to come back home from Iraq, as my friend remarked, “they’ve already begun killing their wives”) and against the subversives (insert long list here) who assail the morality of their mission, subvert their manhood and impugn their honor.

The mark of an American fascist movement will be its ability to alchemically represent the battleground where racism and religion intersect. Pat Buchanan’s key supporters offer us a fabulous taxonomical specimen of this phenomenon (if only it were dead, stuffed and mounted on a wall by a political taxidermist). These voters, who make up the hard, fascist nut of the ‘values voters,’ but who are not synonymous with them, are ideologically defined. Don’t bother with the demographic profiling. It will tell you less than nothing–you will be misled.

Call them Middle American Radicals or ‘MARs’. What’s critical to the MARs is not their education, income level or propensity to watch Fox News. What is central to the concept of a MARs constituency is their worldview: the notion that post Civil Rights era white Americans are a dispossessed majority forced to contend for political power as a new white minority competing with other ethnic and religious groups within an increasingly balkanized set of American identities. And they are trapped between opposing groups: exploited from above by a deracinated, cosmopolitan, urban elite associated with the ‘blue states’ of the democratic west and east coasts and politicians such as John Kerry, they also consider themselves squeezed from below by poor people, minorities and especially immigrants of color. Anti-immigrant organizing is now their central issue. Corporate elites, by supporting programs such as outsourcing and immigration, conspire with the poor to undermine America’s unique place among nations: as that of God’s chosen vessel wherein all riches are divided among the chosen; or, in the secular, colloquial MARs version, the greatest ass-kickin’ country ever, dude!

Why did Kerry lose? Malaise. His ideas merely reflected Republican hegemony, rather than an alternative. Democrats were mobilized pretty narrowly to defeat Bush, rather than for anything. It’s as though the War in Iraq has somehow made the left within the democratic party irrelevant again, rather than insurgent force.

Where’s my peace dividend?

Where’s my peace movement?

“Oh no, we can’t win with those issues,” I am told. Much better to continue endlessly triangulating towards the goal of political power, sacrificing people and ideals along the way. As the sailboat shifts to and fro, tacking from left to right, plotting the most inefficient, confused and confusing course, everyone becomes too sick to guide the boat anywhere, and, most importantly, everyone on board fails to keep their eyes on the prize.

Perhaps you disagree?

Perhaps you really think that John Kerry’s duck hunting so as not to be pigeonholed as a girly-man was effective, but wasn’t taken far enough? Perhaps you think his manly threat to “hunt down, capture and kill the terrorists”, amounted to something other than a murderous mantra? Perhaps you think such xenophobic frothing at the mouth somehow subverted the deadly logic of Bush’s ‘War on Terror’. Perhaps you think Kerry’s “Reporting for Duty!” al la Gomer Pyle routine moved anyone but the hapless veterans busy trying to shore up his sinking swift boat routine. Maybe you flushed with pride when John Kerry adopted the schizophrenic position that [paraphrasing] “had he known then what he knows now he still would have voted for the war.” Maybe you believe all that, and you think Kerry lost the election because he failed to appeal to the faith-based constituency (I just made up that term, because I’m sure someone is going to use it as a weighty synonym for ‘values voter’). Maybe you think he lost because Johnny NASCAR and his big-hair Security Wife and linebacker kids didn’t feel safe enough with Kerry?

Nah.

Kerry lost because although people hated Bush in droves, Kerry failed to energize core Democrats, which would have required doing something other than betraying them, yet again. Kerry betrayed them when he took the nomination for president from the Democratic Party, simultaneously running away from Howard Dean’s mobilized anti-war constituency. Just as the Republicans were getting geared up to kick gays and lesbians off the steps of city hall in eleven states, the democrats demobilized around the War in Iraq. Go ahead. Tell me I’m wrong. But that seems to be the order of events.

To win, Kerry would have had to be for something. What he was for was not really clear, as various pundits have correctly argued. The election was his to win. The war was going badly, the economy sucked and all historical indicators favored a Democratic win. And while I think Kerry is a putz, I didn’t take him to the wall for being out of touch with values voters. Various pundits, including a gaggle cloistered around the Democratic Leadership Council argued for him to chase the proverbial, independent ‘undecided’ vote. Just weeks away from election day the Gallup Polling organization identified this august constituency as having become, for the first time in American election history, statistically immeasurable.

Nice going guys. Help the candidate tailor a message to a phantom voter that some wanker pollster identified in a focus group. Then off they go, looking for the phantom voter rumored to exist in habitat somewhere adjacent the yellow lines of some small town highway, right in the middle of the road then…Bam! Kerry gets run over by a confederate flag waving, white evangelical, in a NASCAR vehicle who never intended to vote for him anyhow. And the guy was dragging an authentic African-American values voter behind him–someone Kerry should have been courting. How long will the democrats be able to take for granted their base before the GOP or some other party cannibalizes the remains? Perhaps it’s already too late. Perhaps the feast has already begun.

By the way, the GOP didn’t have to suppress the African-American vote. The Democrats did that for them. The Democrats don’t just take for granted African Americans, they aggressively undermined their influence. Up until Barack Obama, there wasn’t a single Black Senator in the Senate. Forty-eight Democratic Senators and not one is black? That’s a stunning statistic. A real humdinger. I mean, the democrats were in danger of having the Republicans get a black senator before they did?

Super.

White people seem to be able to invent excuses not to vote for black people. My favorite anecdotal example was the white, normally Democrat-voting, gay guy—openly gay guy—who insisted on voting for the multi-millionaire Republican heiress, a first time congressional candidate with no public service experience whatsoever, as opposed to the eminently qualified and cool candidate, the black guy. That white gay guy supported the heiress right up to—and past—the point where the woman sent him a pre-recorded phone message accusing the black guy of supporting the homosexual agenda. Ugh. Oh, no that couldn’t possibly be about race…This explains why white people, as a matter of routine, vote against their own interests. Because they would rather be relatively poor among their ‘tribe’ than rich among the undeserving. One prejudice can undermine, or in this case, reinforce, another.

Only a few weeks before the presidential election I went to see Jesse Jackson preach some truth to power at a large African-American church in Kansas City, Missouri. A huge choir rocked the house with gospel singing, much crooning and crying, blues-based rock and roll, soul and R&B. There were 700 people there; ten of them white people. And me. There was no article in the local daily, the Kansas City Star, before or after the event. Not even a peep from the alternative weekly. White candidates like Kerry go to Black churches, at election time, but not white people. When Jerry Falwell dragged his meat sack to some mega-church in a Kansas suburb, the newspapers couldn’t give the huckster enough ink. Fifty people showed up.

That’s a heartland without a heart.

Sometimes I wonder about those clichés we like to use as metaphors on the road to ruin: Was the 2000 election, stolen by the Republicans with the complicity of the democrats themselves the canary in the coal mine? Was it the signal that democracy is dead, an elaborate game of three card monty, the rank vestiges of a revolution defeated 30 years ago? Are we the frog in the skillet, with the heat on low? Is there a scorpion on our back, and as we cross the river on our way out of Egypt? When it stings us, will we ask why? Will it respond that our deal was to get out of Egypt, but that no deal was cut about getting to the Promised Land?

I believe the time is past for dispassionate analyses of ‘the fascist aesthetic’ drawn, as blood from a dying patient, from sociological data present in the behavior of pedestrians at intersections or fashion models on cat walks. I think the time for post-modern identity politics that descend into lurid digressions on alienated otherness, is over. Or should be over.

Stick a fork in it, already.

To those who lost it all in the 1960s: You lost. Get over it, and try again. You didn’t lose because you were too radical; you lost because, well, revolutions always lose. What’s important is that you move the pendulum–the whole thing–off its fulcrum.  Two rather fanciful theorists of social movements–Daniel Foss and Ralph Larkin–once called this inevitable period of post revolutionary malaise the re-imposition of social reality with an accompanying state of quiescence.

Ouch.

Get up, dust yourself off, and do it again. Perhaps, this time, with a little more panache. Or at least get out of the way. What is important is that somehow we not allow the passivity and fuzzy logic endemic to the institutionalized Democratic Party chain all of our passions; all of the truths as we know them.

I want a prophet, someone to lead, not follow the shiny bauble of American myth-making. I want some new, American insurgents to give me hope.

Where are you?

END