Category Archives: Anti-Fascism

Anti-Fascism, International, Uncategorized

Antifa Worldwide: A Brief History of International Antifascism

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By Alexander Reid Ross

 

Fascism, as we know it today, came amid the sweeping nationalism accompanying World War I. Numerous leftists shifting from left to right ported their watchwords of solidarity and insurrection over to militant formations designed to destroy the left and seize power. They were not unopposed in this mobilization of a left and right so-called “revolution.” This is the story of the revolutionaries, renegades, and warriors who broke with the powerful movement toward totalitarianism and continue to struggle as partisans for freedom and equality.

Fascism did not emerge on its own as a full cloth ideology. It developed from a complex history of anti-Semitism, ultranationalism, reactionary Catholicism, and the conditions of economic exploitation of industrial workers and peasants. At the turn of the 20th Century, the Dreyfus Affair marked the flash point for violent confrontations between left and right as ultranationalist anti-Semites framed a Jewish army captain for conspiring with the hated Prussians. The right relied on leagues and sporting clubs through which they could practice for physical confrontation while developing the mannerisms and affectations that would attempt to refine an otherwise blunt and stupid politics. Long at odds over the question of anti-Semitism, the left organized through associations, syndicates, and humanitarian organizations to support Dreyfus, organizing an important consensus that would affect future political positions.

In Germany, a financial crisis led to pogroms against Jews. Pogroms throughout Eastern Europe also led to the strengthening of Jewish workers’ defense organizations like the Jewish Bund. Tough men of the Jewish working class, the Bund stewarded marches for dignity and better wages, organized self-defense trainings, and developed autonomous aid networks within Jewish sectors. While Vladimir Lenin criticized the Bund for representing stop-gap politics, the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party went about building combat groups that would resist the counter-revolutionary forces of the Black Hundreds.[1] The anarchists of Russia went a similar direction, including Voline of the St. Petersburg Soviet, Uncle Vanya who helped organize workers’ insurrections from Samara to Ukraine.

But Fascism emerged through the breakdown in the Dreyfusard consensus, the alliance of ultranationalists and leftists around the notion of destroying liberal parliamentarianism, and in doing so managed to bypass the strongest left-wing resistance in the early stages. Instead, through the aesthetics of futurism, the charismatic leadership of Mussolini, and the syncretic positions of national syndicalism, Fascists presented themselves as marking the radical edge that could finally penetrate the armor of moderate politics. Recognizing the danger, anarchists like Errico Malatesta called for a broad antifascist front that discarded political differences in favor of resisting the vicious hierarchies and empty rhetoric of Fascists. Marxists, under the leadership of Antonio Gramsci, would brook no compromise with the anarchist-supported Arditi del Popolo (Army of the People), hoping instead for a mass insurrection of armed workers. With the resistance internally fragmented and the left under assault by an increasing alliance between the Fascists and the state, Mussolini entered government supported by a mass movement and the Fascist blackshirts continued to assassinate and apprehend leaders like Malatesta and Gramsci.

In Germany, the left stood similarly fractured. World War I ended through a massive revolution that started in a Naval mutiny and resulted in the abdication of the Kaiser, as well as a Bavarian insurrection that deposed the local government and established a “Soviet” led by anarchists and communists. Having voted to enter the war, the Social Democrats rose to power through popular left-wing sentiment and compromises with the far right—in particular, the Freikorps, a paramilitary force of army veterans who the Social Democrats would deploy to brutally crush a Communist uprising in Berlin led by Rosa Luxemberg and Karl Liebknecht and the Bavarian Soviet, as well as a renewed uprising in the industrial Ruhr Valley led by a militant force calling itself the Red Army of the Ruhr. It was only after the defeat of these three significant left-wing revolutionary uprisings that Hitler would rise in a beerhall in Munich and pretend to lead a “national revolution” of Freikorps and other paramilitary rightist factions under Nazi guidance.

The left scrambled to the defensive to set Hitler back on his heels, setting up its own combat groups (Kampfbunds) and attacking Nazi meetings and events. Even the Social Democrats, observing the fearsome rise of the brutal Stormtroopers, set up the militant Reichsbanner, but the leadership had already granted significant powers to the Freikorps and the SA simply heightened the tensions. By the early 1930s, the German Communist Party had adopted a defeatist attitude, marking the Social Democrats as “social fascists” and supporting Nazi strikes and parliamentary efforts like a significant “no confidence” vote in the Reichstagg. Those who risked life and limb in the streets fighting Nazis were placed in vulnerable positions by their own leadership. When Hitler took power, the aspirations of the Communist Party’s “First Hitler, then us!” strategy proved totally foolish, as the Nazis immediately demobilized the Kampfbunds, including Antifaschistische Aktion, and sent the left to concentration camps.

In France and the UK, resistance to fascism also manifested in street battles and strategic competitions over urban space. Famously, the UK antifascists repeatedly broke up the meetings of the pugilistic cad, Oswald Mosley, refusing to yield London’s working class East End to fascist influence by halting a march in an event that came to be known as the Battle of Cable Street. Meanwhile, French fascists asserted that they had created fascism by destroying the Dreyfusard consensus, and paramilitary formations emerged across the far right enlisting, paradoxically, the support of anti-Jewish North African Arabs in exchange for money and services. While members of the French radical left “drifted” toward fascism vis-a-vis the “neo-socialism” of Marcel Dèat and the populism of former Communist Party central committee member, “le Grande Jacques” Doriot, others confronted fascists, blockaded meeting venues, and launched antifascist boycotts. Unlike in Germany and Italy, the French and English left was able to prevent voluntary capitulation to fascism—perhaps in part as a result of the rejection of the defeatist line that “bourgeois socialists” and “radical liberals” and even moderate conservatives should be considered as bad as, if not worse than, fascism.

Perhaps nowhere was fascism more heavily contested, however, than in Spain where fascism had a significant following. In 1930, a military coup by Miguel Primo de Rivera adopted fascism “spiritually,” but generally reproduced the old 19th Century authoritarian conservatism and bare-knuckles corporatism. While General Miguel fell from grace, however, his son José Antonio Primo de Rivera, also known simply as José Antonio, rose to prominence and supported a purer form of fascist dictatorship led by the militant forces of a fascist Falange that would defeat leftism in the streets. Leftists, of course, rose to the challenge and fought tooth and nail against the fascism of Spanish aristocrats that situated itself within the working class through an alliance with the Committees of the National Syndicalist Offensive under the leadership of Ramiro Ledesma Ramos. Street fighting between the left and the Falange-National Syndicalist alliance grew extremely intense, with assassinations and beatings spilling over onto left-wing sympathizers and liberals. Following the election of the left-wing Popular Front, leftist police assassinated a leader of the reactionary Catholic conservatives named Calvo Sotelo, sparking an outcry that led, in no small part, to the invasion of Spain by the colonial military forces of Francisco Franco. Although the Popular Front incarcerated José Antonio, the Falange formed a significant, loyal, and ferocious section of Franco’s army, which met with the valiant opposition of anarchist militias hoping not only to defend the Republic but to further the revolutionary interests of self-determination, land, and liberty. Under the anarchist leader, Buenaventura Durruti, the Iron Column marched against Franco’s invading force along with a quasi-Trotskyist forces of POUM, the liberal fighters under Largo Caballero and the Stalinist-backed Communist Party. However, supplied by corporate powers across the Atlantic and tacitly enabled through Allied neutrality and appeasement, the armies of Franco beat down the antifascist resistance with Hitler and Mussolini’s overt assistance.

When Hitler’s tanks rolled into France the next year, it found relatively little resistance. Partisan forces emerged from Italy to Greece and across the Eastern Front. These partisans worked to sabotage fascist communications and supply lines, assassinate officials, and develop antifascist networks, workers’ associations, and societies to propagandize against their respective repressive regimes. After Mussolini and Hitler invaded Greece in 1941, leftists brokered a tenuous truce with ultranationalist “Hellenic Patriots” who supported parafascist dictator Ioannis Metaxas. Fighting persisted in Ukraine and the Balkans, as well, where Nazi-allied forces committed some of the worst atrocities of the war. When the US invaded Italy and occupied Rome in 1943, the partisans of the North engaged in fierce behind-the-lines struggle against the likes of the Black Prince Borghese who remained faithful to Mussolini’s government-in-exile, the Republic of Salò. Russia marshaled and lost tens of millions of people in the explicitly antifascist war to defeat the Reich and the ideology it represented, while the fascist-friendly Allen Dulles set up the architecture for a post-war insurgency inclusive of fascist “stay-behinds” fighting against Soviet influence in Europe.

 

The tenuous peace between partisans unravelled after the War and the collapse of the Reich, at which point the British supported the Hellenic forces’ military struggle against the Communist partisans with whom they had fought only months prior. Similarly, in Italy, the US’s Office of Strategic Services, later eclipsed by the CIA, recruited Fascist agents to oppose the left-wing Popular Front in the 1946 elections, continuing over the next decades to support links between Fascist networks within the government and clandestine terrorist groups targeting public infrastructure in a “Strategy of Tension” designed to pull the population toward the security state. These fascist groups like Black Prince Borghese’s Fronte Nazionale, which included the Nuovo Ordine and Avanguardia Nazionale, were schooled by the CIA-supported Greek military dictatorship that took power in 1967, and attempted on at least one occasion the similar overthrow of Italy’s Christian Democratic Party, were opposed in the streets by a mass movement of left-wing workers, students, and women in the tradition of antifascist partisans.

In France, Franco-sympathizer Pierre Poujade extended the street fights of the 1930s into the 1950s with his radical right populist party of the Union de Défense des Commerçants et Artisans, which was heavily contested by the left. The far-right paramilitary group Organisation Armée Secrète emerged out of the far-right hatred of the post-War Fourth Republic and resistance to decolonization in Algeria to plague the left and set the violent standard for fascist militants organized through groupuscules like Occident and the Groupe Union Défense. These organizations met opposition in Algeria by the militants of the Front de Libération National and in France by militant ultras. A former Poujadist named Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had purportedly lost the use of one eye in a particularly brutal street fight before rising to lead the new National Front in 1972. Some three years later, a bomb blast ripped through Le Pen’s Paris apartment, followed just two years later by a car bomb that killed Le Pen’s close ally, “national revolutionary” François Duprat.

In Italy, the assassinations, fights, and bombings between left and right grew so intense that the period between 1969 and the late 1970s became known as the Years of Lead. The “Hot Summer” of 1969, in which a wave of factory strikes and occupations spread to the general population, sparking the Autonomia movement, was followed by an explosion in Milan’s Piazza Fontana set by fascists to frame the left. Police rounded up anarchists and leftists by the hundreds, including a railroad worker named Giuseppe Pinelli who died in police custody, producing a massive outcry throughout Italy. As fascists persisted in attempting to infiltrate left-wing groups and co-opt the leadership of Autonomia, ongoing clashes and bomb blasts rocked Italy, which spilled into other countries as Italian fascists laying low abroad helped to spread their strategies and tactics elsewhere.

In Germany, opposition to fascism was similarly complicated by post-war “stay-behind” networks. Like Italy, the post-war order in Germany maintained tacit bonds between state entities like the Bundesnachrechtendienst and non-state fascist groupuscules. However, fascist groups like the Sozialistische Reichsparty faced a ban, making overt organizing difficult. At the same time, veterans organizations became breeding grounds for Holocaust denial and Nazi propaganda, and anti-immigrant sentiment was not unusual. During the 1980s, a strong horizontalist resistance movement grew in opposition to nuclear weapons, environmental destruction, and economic exploitation called the Autonomen movement, which targeted and was targeted by fascists seeking to generate mass resistance to immigration, refugees, and multicultural society. Partly in response to the Autonomen movement and the government’s ban on certain fascist parties, “national revolutionaries” developed the strategy of “Freie Kameradschaften”—small groups of 3 to 5 people committed to engaging in political violence against the homeless, disabled people, migrants, non-whites and non-straight people. Through the Freie Kameradschaften, fascists began to appropriate the strategies of the Autonomen movement, including donning black clothing and black masks to maintain anonymity. Yet they met with violent resistance from the leftist Autonomen movement, which produced a new wave of horizontalist Antifaschistische Aktion groups.

As with the Italian terrorists who fled through Franco’s Spain to promote fascism elsewhere in the world, Nazi war criminals like Klaus Barbie had escaped to areas of Latin America and worked to foster a new international movement. Throughout Latin America, and most notoriously in Argentina where the fascist-organized Alianza Anticommunista Argentina fought a “Dirty War” against left-wing Peronists known as Montoneros, fascists helped train and create anti-left paramilitary groups that instigated the conditions for Civil War and military coup. These forces found militant opposition in the form of national liberation armies like the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional in El Salvador who engaged in a long-term revolutionary war against paramilitaries who committed such heinous acts as assassinating the Archbishop Romero during mass and raping then murdering a group of Catholic nuns. At the same time, fascist networks oriented through Salazar’s Portugal strove to maintain colonialism in African countries like Guinea-Bissau, where anti-colonial forces under Amílcar Cabral fought them.

Such far-right and colonial networks developed and/or supported by fascists found happy allies within the US government, including the fairly extensive intelligence networks created by fascist propagandist Willis Carto, Roy Cohn and Lyndon Larouche. Intimately tied to the former’s large base of supporters was a rising fascist militant named David Duke, who mass marketed a new generation of Ku Klux Klan violence as “white civil rights.” Having fallen off after its height in the 1920s, the Klan received a boost of support from the White Citizens Councils and the populist politician George Wallace in the 1960s; however, Wallace’s events faced violent resistance from community groups, and FBI support for integration hindered the Invisible Empire’s growth. The resurgent Klan found powerful opposition in the form of civil society groups and new anti-racist formations.

 

As the Southern Poverty Law Center came into effect, working within the courts and peaceful social organizations to promote diversity against hate, left-wing radicals developed more militant strategies for opposing the rise of fascism. Targeting racism through militant class struggle, the Workers’ Viewpoint Organization attempted to organize an inter-racial textile workers’ union to oppose the Klan in Greensboro, North Carolina. However, the Klan fought back, uniting with area fascists for a 1979 ambush against an anti-Klan rally that left five dead and five wounded. Other left-wing groups like the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee emerged with the desire to expose fascism within the US and to defeat racism through militant class struggle, and met with varying levels of success in the Midwest amid the rise of fascist skinheads.

As well as Latin American military dictatorships, Italian fascists also influenced the English far-right, bringing the “political soldier” concept to a group of fascists that decided to splinter front the National Front and organize skinheads as the frontline shock troops of a new fascist movement. These fascist skinheads mobilized through a network of Oi! punk bands and publications, spreading throughout North America and meeting an increasingly organized resistance by the mid-1980s. Anti-racist skinheads organized into Anti-Racist Action, Red and Anarchist Skinheads, and local manifestations of Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, among other groups, to confront fascists attempting to create a violent mass movement against non-straight, non-white people in society. As fascist skinheads were beaten out of urban areas by anti-racists, fascist strategy moved toward the militia and Patriot movement during the 1990s, which provided a new kind of “leaderless resistance” based in rural areas where the left had a less formidable presence.

These small bands of violent fascists often identified with the fascist skinhead movement also appeared in France under the Parti Nationaliste Française et Européen and Troisième Voie through the related paramilitary formation, the Jeunneses Nationalistes Révolutionnaires, who at times stewarded marches of Le Pen’s Front National. With Le Pen increasingly pressuring the centrist parties at the polls, the French Socialist Party created the popular S.O.S. Racisme group, which promoted multiculturalism through large events and public gatherings. In the streets, the foot soldiers of the “national revolution” found more violent opposition from gangs like the Black Dragons and Duckie Boys. Similarly, in the UK, the large Rock Against Racism movement gave way to the Anti-Nazi League, which cultivated a mass movement against the National Front and British National Party. More confrontational and revolutionary left-wing groups also emerged like Red Action and Anti-Fascist Action, which like Anti-Racist Action joined the militant horizontal strategies and tactics of Antifaschistische Aktion. By the late 2000s, these groups and groups like them were increasingly referred to as “Antifa.”

The appropriation of Autonomen movement strategy and tactics came to a head amid the 2008 recession, when “Autonomist Nationalists” began to form black blocs from the Czech Republic to Germany and the Netherlands. The black blocs were repeated by supporters of the “CounterJihad” movement appearing in Germany as PEGIDA and in England as the English Defense League, among other places. Meanwhile, those groups have seen a rising wave of opposition, including a humiliating running battle between fascists and antifascists in Brighton that left the “March for England” in tatters. This and other events showed that groups with names like National Action and National Resistance that have emerged from Sweden to Ukraine, linking up for spontaneous street demonstrations and acts of mob violence, are virtually impossible to oppose without organized community defense.

In the US, the CounterJihad groups associated with the militia movement galvanized the anti-mosque movement of 2014, appearing outside of places of worship or community centers often with black masks armed with assault rifles and other weapons. These formations are increasingly opposed by likewise-armed community defense groups and antifas who seek to protect non-white communities from attacks and intimidation. More recently, the alt-right has emerged in league with Donald Trump, taking much of its inspiration from the “intellectual” fascist milieu that emerged during the Years of Lead to link left and right and reproduce the conditions that led to the destruction of the Dreyfusard consensus. Where the alt-right has moved into the physical space of real life, it has been dogged by antifa opposition—as in the recent protests against Milo Yiannopolos at the University of California–Berkeley.

 

Fascism has never arisen without opposition through community consensus. Instead, antifascists have worked to root out fascist infiltration and “entryism” that seeks to pass as the merger of left and right, while also militantly opposing fascist marches and meetings. Where fascism obtained power, it did so through the largely through the betrayal of the organized left by its leadership, along with state collaboration with the fascists amid significant, often violent, fighting amongst left-wing groups. If, in Italy and Germany, antifascists had decided to join with powerful liberals and even conservatives to defend their communities against Blackshirts, if the Communists of Germany had not succumbed to the temptation of labelling social democrats the equivalent of fascists while completely alienating everyone outside of a particularly small section of the industrial working class, perhaps fascism might never have emerged—perhaps it would have only been a detail in the history of Italy in the 1910s. It is wise, then, to heed the warnings of history and to maintain a form of militant antifascist action based in tactical alliances and the spirit of friendship rather than vulgar self-interest and political bravado. Where fascism is proud, we must be humble. Where fascism is divisive, we must unite. Where fascism is weak, we must strike.

 

[1] The shock troops of the merciless anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine, the Black Hundreds are widely seen today as some of the earliest formations of what would become the fascist movement, and it was none other than the famous writer Fyodor Dostoevsky who, with a co-author, would set out the platform of the “conservative revolution” followed by the later melding of the German “Patriotic movement” and Marxian theorists known as the National Bolshevik wing of the Nazi Party.

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Alexander Reid Ross teaches geography at Portland State University. He is the author of Against the Fascist Creep and the editor of Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab. His articles have appeared at sites like ThinkProgress, The Ecologist and the Cambridge University Strategic Initiative in Global Food Security. Project Censored recognized his work for Media Democracy in Action in Censored2016.

Anti-Fascism, Interview

Responding to the Fascist Creep: An Interview With Alexander Reid Ross

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Below is an interview conducted with anti-fascist author and organizer Alexander Reid Ross addressing many of the themes raised in his upcoming book, Against the Fascist Creep.  We discuss what the idea of “creeping fascism” is, where it has become prevalent, and what organizations have begun to confront it.

 

Anti-Fascist News: Could you explain a little bit about this concept of “creeping fascism” that you built the book on?

 

Alexander Reid Ross: So the idea of creeping fascism is the emergence of fascism on the global stage through its tacit and often concealed acceptance either organizationally or in theory. So, for example, when leftwing movements in, say, 2009-2010 started trading in a very conservative language of ethnic nationalism and separatism, you know, like “white people deserve their own place because people of color are naturally inclined towards one another,” that was a sign that there some kind of influence and networking that was going on, and, again, if not organizationally, then in the ideological terrain. And I’m not saying that all left wing organizations were doing that, but I did notice a marked pattern in some of them. There was a sense in some sectors, even when Occupy came around, that we had to defeat the liberals in power even if that means letting the fascists in through the back door. I think that’s been proven false, and we need to learn from those mistakes through material analysis.

 

AFN: What kind of movements was that showing up in?

 

ARR: I think I saw it emerging in the anarchist movement and, to an extent, in some of the left wing issue based movements where Marxists were more prevalent, whether anti-imperialist or anti-war or whatever. Then there are the non-left or post-left radical groups that are just as vulnerable, if not more so. I found out, for example, that the national anarchists had been trying to affect an influence, like in Earth First! even, in the northeast, which came as kind of a surprise to me. It did sort of open my eyes to the fact that because as an editor of the Earth First! Journal during that period, I had been sort of unwittingly implicated in this process.

I think there was also a point after 2008 and the market crash that radical movements experienced an influx of people and didn’t have a filtering process that was equipped to handle the parsing through of different ideas that exist in the radical milieu, and that’s really where it takes place. Fascism emerges from the radical milieu as a combination of right and left wing ideas. If you just want to say, “I’m neither left nor right but I’m radical,” then there’s going to be a lot of territory that is contested, and that is very vulnerable to a sort of fascistic proclamations and ideological positions.

 

AFN: How do you respond to that then or how should left wing movements respond to that creeping influence? What are effective strategies I guess?

 

ARR: I think first and foremost is education. That was one thing that I started to do for myself after the news about Earth First! came out. The fact was that this one national anarchist had helped to schedule a fundraiser for Earth First!, and then they used that to speak very loudly to a European national anarchist audience about connections between Earth First! and national anarchism.

Any single move like that can be blown up into direct coordination, which is terrible, but you can always immediately quash that openly. What’s more difficult is that you have to be careful about the world of ideas in order to recognize how left wing intentions and ideas can be twisted by racists or sexists, and how that is connected to organizational affinities. So it’s equally important to recognize both the intellectual history of fascism and the trajectory of different fascist organizations. Both have fostered new movements and ideological currents that have also segued into the left wing.

The organizational factor is particularly important when talking about national anarchism because a lot of people see broader radical subcultures or milieus as more safe or secure from fascism than the left. For example, people embrace queer culture as distinct from the left, denying that fascism can have queer folks, suggesting that if there are queer people in a particular group or movement it can’t be fascist. Of course some of the most important fascists have been queer, from Rohm to Kuhnen, Nicky Crane, and Douglas P to David McCalden and perhaps Roy Cohn. The same thing goes for environmentalism, vegetarianism, avant-garde music and cultural scenes, punk, and other subcultural milieus.

Without any kind of introspection, the left or subcultures can safely say that Fascism is ultranationalist and administrative, so you would never have a fascist talking about breaking down nation-states and building up anti-hierarchical communities or, rather, communities who function through “organic hierarchy.” But, in fact, if you look at fascist organizations in the past, that is precisely what’s made them more radical than their conservative antagonists—that they have attacked nationalism in a bureaucratic or technocratic form, saying that what’s necessarily in politics is a nationalism of energy and vigor rather than a nationalism of intellectuals and functionaries, and what’s necessary isn’t a nation-state at all but a “spiritual empire” with a grand patriarch at the helm who makes the law through decision.

Without understanding the way that those ambiguous ideas are applied in different milieus, like with national anarchism and autonomous nationalism and those sorts of things, radicals can fall for easy platitudes. Pan-secessionism is another great example. When radicals start talking about the need for separatism without a clear, cosmopolitan follow-up strategy, they leave ourselves wide open to their influence and the insinuation of fascism and the ability for fascist ideas and movements to gain ground in the radical milieu and also in the broader subcultures and in mainstream cultures. When they start talking about ethnic separatism—particularly white separatism, whether de jure or de facto—they’ve basically given up the field.

I think that people in the radical milieu are very disconnected from the impact and effect that they have and their ideas actually have on the mainstream. People often look to radicals to get a sense of direction, particularly vis-a-vis subcultures, so if fascists are given a pass to influence subcultures then the mainstream is far more likely to accept them piecemeal on the basis of accepted ideas and attitudes which are very deleterious. For example, you’ve probably heard of people who you might have thought of as a left wing or a radical saying things like “I don’t believe in equality” or “equality is nonsense” or “I don’t believe in freedom,” or that kind of thing. These kinds of statements seem geared to impress people or shock them or both, but does all that really work for us?

 

AFN: As there has been a rise of white nationalism, what movements or organizations do you think have really effectively started to counter organize that?

 

ARR: It is great to see all of the Antifa groups springing up, the first of which I think was Rose City Antifa, but New York City Antifa and a bunch of others are equally important. When it works, it’s one of the best models for channeling the popular reflexes and spontaneous movements towards confronting fascism in organized and focused ways. I think networking these horizontal groups will provide important support bases for people down the road.

In the long run I also think that groups Public Research Associates and Searchlight have done great watchdogging, and more recently the One Peoples Project has been excellent at pinpointing National Policy Institute and American Renaissance. The alt-right. They were really the first group to identify these sort of “mom’s basement trolls” as wielding a significant power in todays Internet 2.0 or in todays intellectual circuit, academia even. And they’ve done a really good job at confronting it as well, not just through massive protests but through pressure campaigns; calling, getting their events shut down.

Other media outlets are key. Anti-Fascist News has done an awesome job of disseminating key information about these groups and this movement before anybody else and that’s one of the reasons people say mainstream society is influenced by the radical movements. Part of the reason is because radical movements can see changes when they are happening in mainstream society so that distance where its difficult to measure the impact, and the effect is also part of the virtue because it means that there’s a critical analysis that’s taking place. That’s why I think that, for example, Anti-Fascist News has been able to do such a great job of identifying these momentum-building movements and also chokepoints of getting them shut down.

So I do think that there is always going to be a place for militant anti-fascism, but a huge part of that is just researching, understanding a cost-benefit analysis strategy, and rather mainstream stuff like getting events shut down. So those are some of the biggest things, I think—like the increase of organized Antifas, people willing to show up in the streets and willing to protest and fight fascists, and the middle ground mainstream groups, of which I think One People’s Project has been the most forward thinking and I think also media like Anti-Fascist News and It’s Going Down, for example, have really picked up a lot of slack in terms of analyzing Trump, analyzing the alt-right, and actually using intelligence to shut them down.

 

Articles by Alexander Reid Ross

 

Order Against the Fascist Creep at AK Press

Anti-Fascism, Entryism, Third Positionism

Against the Fascist Creep Looks at How Fascism Presents a Threat to the Left, and How We can Fight It

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Fascism, as an iconoclastic and revolutionary political orientation, is one that has made itself dynamic by bucking the traditions associated with the Right. While it is anti-liberal, anti-multicultural, and anti-democratic, it is also anti-conservative. As it believes in a mythical understanding of a “pure” past, it believes that the institutions of the past, the authorities that exist today, can no longer be “conserved.” Instead, they need a radical solution; one that destroys the conventional order and rebuilds one that they believe is a modernist interpretation of the empires of the deep past. This is not an accurate interpretation of historical nations, of course, but instead a reactionary fantasy that is colored by unrestrained hatreds, the desire to oppress, and the need to rethink contemporary society and reinstate explicit inequality.

To do this project, fascism looks to many movements and ideas associated with the Left in an attempt to “get to the root” of the problem and to recruit revolutionaries who could be swayed by their romanticism. This process is where fascists use Leftist projects for Right wing core ideas, like inequality, racial nationalism, and a cult of violent masculinity. This process was not just true in interwar Europe, but even today as neo-fascism attempts to make its way into social movements founded on Left wing principles. Anti-imperialism, radical ecology, animal rights, post-colonialism, broad-based anti-capitalism, and other projects have all seen attempts at entryism by the far right, and they have worked hard to have their ideas infect these political tendencies, so much so that often times people are unaware that a fascist politic has made its way into their political vision.

This is the founding idea behind the fantastic new book, Against the Fascist Creep, by anti-fascist journalist and author, Alexander Reid Ross. The book, just released by AK Press, outlines a history of fascism since its development in Italy, Germany, Austria, and other European nations, and how it has shifted and evolved in the decades since.

The “fascist creep,” as I am using the term in this text, refers to the porous borders between fascism and the radical right, through which fascism is able to “creep” into mainstream discourse. Howev­er, the “fascist creep” is also a double-edged term, because it refers more specifically to the crossover space between right and left that engenders fascism in the first place. Hence, fascism creeps in two ways: (1) it draws left-wing notions of solidarity and liberation into ultranationalist, right-wing ideology; and (2), at least in its early stages, fascists often utilize “broad front” strategies, proposing a mass-based, nationalist platform to gain access to mainstream po­litical audiences and key administrative positions. (AtFC, pg. 3)

Ross weaves a history in the crevices where fascism attempts to find an avenue into mainstream discourse and reclamation of its revolutionary potential. In the years after World War II, fascist ideologues changed their rhetoric and strategies, often arguing for ethnic separatism, anti-colonial racial nationalism, and meta-political orientations so that they could avoid the associations with the failed movements of Mussolini and Hitler. At the same time, far right terrorism through the Years of Lead had direct ties to the spiritual paths of people like Julius Evola and to right populist political parties like France’s Front Nationale. Over the years the development of neofolk, Asatru and ethnic forms of Nordic paganism, the militia movement, the European New Right, and, later, the Alt Right, were all attempts at finding a new space for fascist ideas and a way to make them new and exciting again to an upcoming generation of racialists.

In the U.S., the development of national anarchism through groups like the Bay Area National Anarchists and the National Anarchist Tribal Alliance of New York, have been a part of this continuous reimagining, and they had the potential to try and recruit from the left. Projects like Attack the System, the national-anarchist, pan-secessionist project we have discussed before, has attempted to bridge the world of Left and post-left anarchism with fascism, allowing in white nationalists as a real “revolutionary” force. In the case of the radical environmental movement, where anarchism has intersected with revolutionary forms of ecology, National Anarchism has made larger inroads by exploiting deconstructionist impulses. This was particularly true in the case of Green Anarchist magazine, which Ross explains was the target of entryism by the syncretic fascist philosopher Troy Southgate.

As Southgate navigated the fascist scene, he became increasingly drawn to a branch of the left-to-right ecology movement cofounded by a British intellectual named Richard Hunt. Hunt’s UK-based journal, Green Anarchist, advocated positions that were just as problematic as, if not worse than, its US coun­terparts. Hunt’s “beyond right and left” political ideology gener­ated particular hostility from the left. A supporter of village-level anarchism on a bioregional basis that operated outside of present contexts of nation-states and consumer societies, Hunt argued that racism was natural to people but unhelpful in the context of anticapitalist movements. While Hunt supported blood and soil–style bioregional movements, he incorporated nationalist histories and “ethnopluralism” in keeping with Benoist’s ideals of diversi­ty. When Hunt backed the United Kingdom’s involvement in the Persian Gulf War based on patriotic sentiment, he was pushed out of Green Anarchist and formed a new journal entitled Alternative Green, which more explicitly advocated for a decentralized bioregionalism with traditionalist and nationalist tendencies, seeing the potential of national and cultural rebirth after the collapse of industrial civilization. (AFC 162-63)

Anti-imperialist projects have found allies in white nationalists in that they are for “Ethno-pluralism,” the right to separation from the dominant culture to maintain cultural “legitimacy.” While many discuss the right to reclaim identity for indigenous people or those of African descent, the fascist element in this discourse believes that white should be afforded this as well, and instead of seeing race as a social invention with consequence they think it is a biological and spiritual reality that should create divisions among groups. In this way, they are “against empires” since they see it as a form of “globalization” that destroys ethnic nationalism and homogeneity in nation states.

What Ross analyzes is broadly within the “Third Positionist” camp, which utilizes elements of the left for a far right purpose. This means anti-capitalist critiques from the right, even going as far as to embody some of the same visioning as the left.

With its syncretic configuration of political ideology, Third Positionism took root in the skinhead and neofolk subcultures as a kind of palingenetic ultranationalism that, with a pessimistic and nihilist sense of modern life, looked toward a revolutionary new age born of traditional culture that could thrive amid the collapse of liberal multiculturalism. (AFC 137)

While Third Positionism is often called a variant on fascism, even a minority within the larger movement, it is actually the dominant expression of fascism. The Alt Right, Neoreaction, racialist paganism, and so on, are all forms of Third Positionist thought, and the meta-political projects like Neofolk, which attempt to push fascist ideas through non-political venues, are comfortably within this analysis as well. It is from this vantage point that entryism on the left presents itself, and this can happen ideologically even without a concerted strategy from fascist organizers.

Ross attempts to answer these contradictions by putting out a call for consistency and understanding of how politics develop, to see the consequences of ideas. Are your politics consistently opposed to racial nationalism and in favor of multicultural society? Are your environmental politics intersectional, opposed to racism, and in favor of immigration? The Left’s projects have to have a clear understanding of the motivating factors for their own political ideas, as well as the ideas of the far right. The “fascist creep,” as Ross labels it, is the way that fascism can seep into left spaces, such as music circles or the movement against international capitalism. This can mean sorting out the way that anti-Semitic narratives seep into the anti-corporate and Palestinian solidarity movement, the “natural law” discourse that is celebrated in some Deep Ecological projects, and the cynical nihilism that has often been a part of the anti-consumerist movement, and to then build a politic that keeps the values of equality and diversity at the center of these varied movements. This is a call for intersectionality, or class compositional analysis, that sees that these movements need a way to remain connected and cannot throw each other aside for short-term gains.

As the Alt Right grows in the U.S., so does the anti-fascist movement. In Trump’s America there has been a validation of their toxic racism, yet there is also a growth of a mass anti-fascist movement that wants to shuffle off their influence. To do this effectively necessitates having a deep understanding of the movements we oppose so that we can clearly see where fascism is, where it grows, and where it comes from. Without that we are scrambling in the dark, calling anything reactionary or authoritarian “Fascism” without being able to see its growth in the corners. Ross’s book can be a guide for this, tracing us through how this movement of hierarchy and inequality has changed over the years, and he is able to boil it down to its essentials.

 

You can order his book here directly from AK Press.

 

 

Anti-Fascism, Uncategorized

Anti-Racist Action of Columbus Plans Public Demonstration to Confront Neo-Nazi Activists with Ties to Central Ohio

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The Columbus chapter of Anti-Racist Action (ARA) held a public demonstration on Saturday, January 14th to confront Greg Anglin, a local business owner who served as the original registrant of The Daily Stormer, a nationally known neo-Nazi website, run by Greg’s son Andrew Anglin, a former resident of Worthington. Greg Anglin’s Worthington business address still receives donations for the site. Through The Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin is organizing and publicizing an armed white-nationalist march in Whitefish, Montana, home of white nationalist Richard Spencer, which was originally scheduled for Martin Luther King Day weekend, but has been postponed after the city of Whitefish rejected the group’s incomplete permit application. Anglin now says the march will likely take place in February. ARA went forward with its demonstration, which was originally planned to coincide with the armed march in Whitefish. Speakers included members of ARA and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ).

ARA and anti-fascist allies are urging community members to stand up against the hateful rhetoric that Anglin and his supporters promote. “We are taking action to send a clear message to hate groups from Worthington to Whitefish, that their dangerous, xenophobic agenda will not be tolerated”, said Timothy Philip, an ARA spokesperson.

  • WHO:     Anti-Racist Action of Columbus and Community Allies

  • WHERE:    6827 N. High St., Worthington, OH 43085

  • WHAT:    Demonstration Against Hate from Worthington to Whitefish

  • WHEN:    January 14th, 2017 at 1:00 P.M.

ARA is an international network of people from all walks of life who are dedicated to eliminating racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and discrimination against the disabled, the oldest, the youngest, and the most oppressed people.

Anti-Fascism, Donald Trump, Uncategorized

Massive Protests at Trump’s Inauguration Aim to Set a Tone of Resistance for the Coming Years

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Below is the press information that the “Media Working Group” of the DisruptJ20 organizing effort made available outlining the schedule of events for the inauguration day protests Washington D.C.

***

Fully-Permitted “Festival of Resistance,” Checkpoint Actions, Unpermitted Marches, DisruptJ20 Action Camp
Press Events Scheduled this Week Include Access to a Sign-Making Session and a Nonviolent Direct Action Training at the DisruptJ20 Action Camp

Press Events / Photo Ops:
1) Wednesday, Jan 11, 6 PM – 7 PM, Art Event, sign making, banner painting, art, photo op
Tyghe Berry Studio, 1241 Evart Street NE, Washington DC
2) Thursday, Jan 12, 9:30 AM – 10:30 AM, Press Conference, get info on street protests
St Stephen’s Church Auditorium, 1525 Newton St NW, Washington DC
3) Saturday, Jan 14, 2 PM – 3 PM, Nonviolent Direct Action Training, workshop, photo op
SIS Building Atrium, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington DC

Washington DC — Activists and organizers are planning massive protests and acts of resistance throughout the week of the inauguration of Donald J. Trump on January 20. The DC Counter-Inaugural Welcoming Committee, also known as DisruptJ20, is planning a “Festival of Resistance,” a massive permitted, family-friendly march and rally on the 20th, as well as an unpermitted “Anticapitalist Bloc” march, protests at all twelve Secret Service security checkpoints, activist parties, and more. The goal is to give expression to the massive opposition to Trump’s right-wing, racist, and misogynist agenda. Organizers intend to demonstrate that people of conscience are the majority, and take steps towards organizing that sentiment into a force that can have an impact on Trump’s ability to claim a mandate, setting a tone of resistance for the coming years.
**Schedule of Protest Events is below.**

Three press events will help the media organize coverage for the protests of the Inauguration. At 6 PM on Wednesday, January 11, an art event will take place to give press a glimpse of the artistic and creative energies that will be expressed during the inauguration week of resistance. At 9:30 AM on Thursday, January 12, a press conference will give media access to activists and organizers planning some of the most memorable and disruptive events of the week. At 2 PM on Saturday, January 14, an open nonviolent direct action training will allow press to see activists in a hands-on training to learn how to engage in civil disobedience and safely risk arrest.

Beginning at 9 AM on January 20, McPherson Square in downtown Washington DC will be a DisruptJ20 staging area and rallying point for many marches, as well as spontaneous, unpermitted events. An unpermitted, anticapitalist march will begin at 10 AM in Logan Circle. A fully-permitted DisruptJ20 march will begin at 12 PM at Columbus Circle and march to McPherson Square. Another permitted march organized by Occupy Inauguration will start from Malcolm X Park (often called Meridian Hill) and march downtown to McPherson Square join DisruptJ20. McPherson Square will contain tents, portable toilets, a stage, sound system, signage, a medic area, food donations, and other amenities. More unpermitted actions are likely to occur at some point after 3 PM and continue into the evening.

Colorful disruptions will occur right at the Inaugural Parade Route. DisruptJ20 organizers have identified twelve checkpoints that participants will have to pass through in order to attend the inaugural festivities. To call attention to the many threats faced by people and planet, each of these twelve checkpoints will be the site of an issue-specific protest. Issues will include racial justice, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+, antiwar, immigrant and border justice, labor, climate, and other issues.

Each checkpoint protest is being organized by a group or set of groups in collaboration with DisruptJ20. In the past, each checkpoint has included metal detectors, police officers, the Secret Service, and national guard. Details and logistics are still being pulled together for these twelve actions, and information will be released publicly as soon as possible.

DisruptJ20 is also coordinating mass housing for activists from out of town, legal support for arrestees and others, medic teams to be present in the street, de-escalation teams to respond to conflict, media teams to relay current information, gathering spaces for activists, and more. Information such as welcome packets, maps, and event calendars will be distributed to the press and public.

Many groups are allied with DisruptJ20 in sending a clear message during the J20 week. A climate-specific day of action will occur on Thursday, January 18, culminating in a Earth2Trump Roadshow with performers and speakers. Antifascist groups are planning a protest at the “Deploraball,” a Trump celebration planned by white supremacists, Nazis, and rape apologists on January 19 at the National Press Club. The ANSWER Coalition is planning a large rally on January 20. A #Trump420 event planned by the DC Marijuana Justice Coalition will feature people handing out marijuana joints. Through the evening, the Peace Ball, the UnNagural, and the Unity Ball will all provide entertainment, music, and libations while standing opposed to Trump’s agenda. The All in Service DC campaign has coordinated, during the lucrative weekend, for bars and restaurants to give donations to local nonprofits serving at-risk communities. The People’s Inaugural Ball on January 20 and People’s Inauguration on January 21 are being planned by #StayWokeAndFight with Howard University to call for racial justice. The Women’s March on Washington will occur on Saturday, January 21.

From January 14 to January 16, DisruptJ20 will hold the DisruptJ20 Action Camp, a series of trainings and workshops in DC to prepare people for upcoming actions, particularly those around the Inauguration. The trainings aim to provide space for participants to collectively analyze and discuss why resistance and action is important under the Trump administration, how we can resist, and what future our actions are building towards.

More releases of information from the DisruptJ20 Media Team are forthcoming, and there will be a press conference call on the evening of January 20 to provide information on the day’s activities. Please visit our DisruptJ20 Media page if you wish to sign up to receive these releases.

# # #

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

We are organizing a week of trainings, actions, and events leading up to the mobilization on January 20th. Below you will find details about these events as well as convergence space for the week starting with January 14th.
January 14-16th – Action Camp
Jan 14 – 15th – American University, 10am-7pm
Jan 15th – Action Spokes Council
Jan 16th – St Stephens, 1525 Newton St NW, 10am-7pm
January 15th – Trade Justice blockade webinar – http://tradejustice.net/11517
January 17-19 – Convergence Space
Food, daily NVDA trainings, Affinity group meetings, spokes councils
St Stephens, 1525 Newton St NW, 9am-6pm
January 18 -21st- Climate Convergence
January 19th – Deploraball
January 20th –
Early Morning – Blockades Action
9am – Outdoor Convergence Space @ McPherson Square opens
10am – Anti-Capitalist Anti-Fascist Bloc @ Logan Circle
12pm – Festival of Resistance, permitted march starting @ Columbus Circle
2pm – Rally at McPherson Square

Alternative Right, Anti-Fascism, anti-semitism, Neo-Nazi, Uncategorized

Montana Antifa Calls for Supporters to Contact Whitefish Hotels and Tell Them About Incoming Nazis

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As incoming neo-Nazis organized by Andrew Anglin and the Daily Stormer promise to descend on Whitefish, Montana, Montana Antifa is one of the organizations creating the counter-demonstration.  While Love Lives Here has been doing the base-building work of organizing the community against the anti-Semitic and racist harassment they have endured for weeks, they are not going to engage with the skinheads and Alt Righters who are promising to march through the streets with automatic weapons.  Montana Antifa, among others, is taking up that role, and right now they are doing a blitz on regional Whitefish and Flathead Valley hotels to let them know that Nazis may be trying to book stays with them and that they should prohibit those groups from taking refuge in their facility.

In a recent statement from Montana Antifa:

IMMEDIATE ACTION. Read this carefully and closely: NO THREATS, NO HOSTILITY, AS OF RIGHT NOW NONE OF THESE HOTELS HAVE DONE ANY WRONG. We’re asking that you call into the hotels on this list and express these two concerns:

1.) Concern that the hotels would assist Nazi insurgents by sheltering them and allowing them a base from which to commit their evil acts.

2.) Concern for the safety of the hotel, hotel staff, and guests in light of armed thugs setting up a base of operations in the hotel intending to do harm to the community.

STRESS THESE POINTS:
-There is a planned armed March by Neo-Nazis in Whitefish
-They are planning on bringing in a force of Neo-Nazi skinheads from California who are likely to be armed
-These are dangerous people intending to harm the neighboring communities in a public action with heavy media coverage.

PLEASE DO NOT:
-Threaten the hotel
-Insult the person answering the phone or the hotel
-Make ANY “or else” statements
-Harass the hotels
-Go off on a tirade
-Ask if they have Battletoads 2

Be respectful, respectable, and conduct yourselves smartly.

HAVE FUN, OPERATORS ARE STANDING BY:

Kalispel

Super 8 Kalispell Glacier National Park
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Econo Lodge Inn & Suites
:(406) 752-3467

Motel 6
:(406) 952-3206

The FairBridge Inn & Suites – Outlaw Convention Center
:(406) 755-6100

Travelodge Kalispell
(406) 755-6123

Kalispell Hilltop Inn
:(406) 755-4455

Americas Best Value Inn
:(406) 756-3222

Greenwood Village Inn and Suites
(406) 257-7719

Red Lion Hotel Kalispell
(406) 751-5050

Quality Inn
(406) 755-6700

La Quinta Inn & Suites Kalispell
(406) 257-5255

Kalispell Grand Hotel
:(406) 755-8100

Hampton Inn Kalispell
:(406) 755-7900

SpringHill Suites Kalispell
:(406) 314-6600

Holiday Inn Express & Suites Kalispell
:(406) 755-7405

Best Western Plus Flathead Lake Inn And Suites
:(406) 857-2400

Homewood Suites by Hilton Kalispell, MT
:(406) 755-8080

Hilton Garden Inn Kalispell
:(406) 756-4500

Glacier Ridge Suites
:(406) 752-4333

Colombia Falls: Meadow Lake Resort
Phone:(406) 892-8700

North Forty Resort
Phone:(406) 862-7740

Cedar Creek Lodge
(406) 897-7070

Glacier Inn Motel
:(406) 892-4341

The River Rock Hostel
:(406) 871-2161

Meadow Lake View
:(406) 892-0900

Western Inn and Campground
(406) 892-7686

Bad Rock Bed and Breakfast
(406) 892-2829

Glacier Mountain Lodge
:(406) 892-2661

STAY POLITE AND INFORM INFORM INFORM

They are also taking donations, and you can click here to support them!

Alternative Right, Anti-Fascism, Neo-Nazi

Donate to Montana Antifa to Counter Protest the Nazis Coming to Whitefish

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As we have been covering, the small resort town of Whitefish, Montana is under seige by Alt Right trolls after several of their residents decided they no longer wanted to deal with Richard Spencer and his family making money in their town.  The organization Love Lives Here, an affiliate of the Montana Human Rights Network, has been doing broad-based community organizing in the town.  This includes supporting the Jewish residents who have been specifically targeted for threats from the Daily Stormer and their friends by creating a system where by all residents of the town put “Menorah cards” in their window to show solidarity.  They have recently organized a large rally for diversity, showing that residents will be supporting each other and that the racialist narrative of the Alt Right has no draw in the town.

Love Lives Here will not be organizing the counter-demonstration to the Nazis who are planning on “marching against Jews” on January 15th, their strategy is to build the community base of support yet not to actually engage with the Nazis.  On the other side, Montana Antifa, based in the nearby Missoula, are planning on organizing the counter demonstration to show that Montanans are not going to sit back and let their towns be terrorized by armed skinheads.

Right now Montana Antifa are organizing a fundraiser to pay for the basic costs of having the counter-protest, including bussing in folks from surrounding towns that want to raise their voice against the hate.

Donate to the Montana Antifa Fundraiser Here to Stand Against the Nazis Coming to Whitefish, Montana

 

Alternative Right, Anti-Fascism

How Montana Anti-Racists Confronted the Alt Right and Neo-Nazis Plan to Terrorize Marginalized Residents In Revenge

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The neo-Nazi wing of the Alt Right is planning for a small-town Kristallnacht in 2017.

 

How did we get here? It all derives from a privileged racist who wanted to ski in the most pristine part of the U.S. When enigmatic Alt Right founder Richard Spencer took over the National Policy Institute in 2010, he took the non-profit and reestablished it in the town of Whitefish, Montana. Whitefish, set in the gorgeous Flathead Valley, is a resort town in the shade of Glacier National Park and a number of high-priced, private ski resorts. His parents, who lived and worked in Dallas, Texas, made Whitefish their vacation home given their love for the slaloms. Richard’s father, a well-paid conservative Othmamologist and his mother, a Ron Paul supporter who did GOP fundraisers, did not want to make their presence in Whitefish a political one.

3b6b231400000578-4037140-image-a-10_1481827408429
Richard Spencer’s Parents, Sherry Spencer and Dr. Rand Spencer.

And neither did Richard. Instead, he wanted to live in their $3 million dollar home and use their properties, one that his mother, Sherry Spencer, had purchased to make money renting to retail businesses and vacationers booking through Air BnB. Richard moved his new wife, the Russian photographer and Third Positionist Nina Kouprianova, and started his life in Whitefish. He rented an apartment in Arlington, Virginia for when he needed to do his conferences and network in Washington D.C., and the rest of the time he used a home office to write, edit his books, create podcasts, and so on. Only more recently did he rent out the office space in a strip mall in Whitefish, which likely lends to the complications that started to happen as his wife left him and things became strained with his parents.

Whitefish has not welcomed Richard, to say the least. After Richard harassed a GOP consultant on a chairlift at the expensive ski resort they are both members at, people in town finally had to reckon with the fact that one of the most well funded and loudest white nationalists in the country was sharing their supermarket. Later that year Spencer was banned from entering Hungary by Viktor Orban himself after he had organized a “pan-European” fascist conference with the support of the nationalist party Jobbik and featuring Russian New Rightist and Euraisianist Aleksandr Dugin. Spencer was detained and deported and the conference ended up being a failure, and when he was banned from entering the EU it was a low point for his movement (he was later banned from entering the UK as well).

When Spencer returned, the people of Whitefish had begun to organize with the local anti-racist/anti-fascist organization Love Lives Here, a member organization of the incredible Montana Human Rights Network (MHRN). The MHRN has been a leader of progressive organizing in rural parts of the country, especially by confronting the rise of the Patriot militias and those from the Northwest Imperative of the white nationalist movement who see the “Whitetopia” of Montana as a future “white homeland.” Love Lives Here organized to pass a resolution to stop white nationalist organizations from having conferences and essential operations in Whitefish, which ended up being curtailed in favor of a broader city council declaration of a commitment to diversity.

As Spencer began to gain a huge amount of celebrity in the wave of Trump and the Alt Right that defined 2016, Whitefish became increasingly uncomfortable with their most famous resident. They especially did not like that Sherry Spencer, who was becoming a wealthy property owner and businesswoman in the town, aided and abetted her son by giving him use of her properties (they shared an address at one point). While she said that she didn’t agree with his politics, she became the most essential piece in the Alt Right, allowing Spencer to grow the movement without being forced to think about finances.

3B69A93E00000578-0-image-a-12_1481811165428.jpg
Sherry Spencer’s building.

Love Lives Here began to push the issue with Sherry Spencer, stating that people in town did not appreciate her allowance of her son’s genocidal racist ideas. After the Atlantic video came forward showing Richard Spencer yelling “Hail Trump, Hail Our People, Hail Victory” and many NPI conference goers doing Roman Salutes, the town had enough. Sherry Spencer’s ownership of a new building at 22 Lupfer Avenue is what especially caused the controversy, and Tanya Gersh specifically helped to raise the profile of Sherry as profiting off of the town while giving support to her son’s organization. According to the Virginia’s state corporation commission, her property is still listed as the primary headquarters for the National Policy Institute.

People stopped wanting to do business with her and potential customers were let know about her connections, with Air BnB renters canceling their appointments. Sherry, facing the financial blowback, began considering selling the property, but then railed against Gersh and Love Lives Here saying that she was being extorted into selling the property. This only comes from the fact Gersh said she would list the property if Sherry wanted her to, and suggested she give a donation to the MHRN as a show of good faith. Sherry put together a Medium.com post that outlined her side of the story, yet was mainly blanketing anti-racist groups and activists like Gersh as haters.

While Sherry battled with the community, the Alt Right took things to another level. Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer made Sherry’s situation his new pet cause, and did post upon post about the town, the people in it, and the anti-racist organizations. He then put in the information of local business owners and residents, including young children, putting the yellow Star of David with “Jude” in the middle on top of them, referencing the star that Jews were forced to wear as they were rushed to their death in cattle cars. Alt Right “shitlords” on social media began harassing the Jewish and other residents of Whitefish, calling in, spamming their businesses on Yelp, and creating such a climate of fear in which many were scared for their lives. It became so bad that town council people like Frank Sweeney spoke out against it, which was a strong move since Sweeney had consulted with the Southern Poverty Law Center back in 2014 about how to address the situation with Spencer during the first round. Later, even the Governor spoke out and had planned a visit to Whitefish to show support.

Love Lives Here began a broad-based solidarity project, where they arranged the handouts of “Menorah” cards so that people could put them in their window to show solidarity with the Jewish residents who were the victims of the vicious harassment. This show of support is one that unites the community softly; hoping to secure those bonds if the organization is to do even more involved organizing. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes also joined the admonishment of bigotry, and the entire state has come together in opposition to the Alt Right trolls who are trying to terrorize marginalized groups. This is what effective solidarity organizing looks like as it creates one community in opposition to the divisive nature of the far right, and it meant hat the Alt Right will have dramatically less pull in the state and the media.

The Daily Stormer then began a call to organize a march in Whitefish, one that is specifically meant to target the Jews of the city and calling them the financial and organizational infrastructure. This hails back to the Kristallnacht tragedy in Germany when the SS went and ransacked Jewish businesses, ramping up the cultural pogrom against Jews and blaming them nonsensically for the financial turmoil of the German country since the First World War. While this may seem extreme even for Anglin, he has made a name for the Daily Stormer by naming Trump opponents to kill and trying to get followers to create fake “black” accounts on Twitter to defame people of African origin.

Anglin’s march “against Jews, Jewish businesses and everyone who supports either” is set to happen on January 15th. Because of Montana’s liberal gun laws, they planned this to be an “armed march” to intimidate locals Jews and progressives, and he is planning to “bus in” skinheads from the Bay Area. This includes Goldenstate Skinheads (Goldenstate United), who were involved in the recent stabbing in Sacramento as well as in the early organizing of the American Freedom Party. This will also include members of the Traditionalist Workers Party, or its adjunct community organization the Traditionalist Youth Network, which often bridges the Blue Collar world of the KKK and skinheads with the Alt Right. This could also include members of Identity Europa, which has a heavy presence in the Bay Area of California.

In opposition, Love Lives Here and anti-racist are planning a January 7th celebration in favor of diversity, again rallying the community together with food, speakers, and music to create unity that will be necessary to combat the onslaught. While Andrew Anglin seems particularly set on bringing 200 armed racists to Whitefish to intimidate locals and possibly instigate bloody vengeance, Richard Spencer is actually saying that Anglin is just joking and that there will be no march.

All of this is bad news for Richard Spencer who has intimated recently that he might run for congress in Montana. As Love Lives Here and the MHRN is rally the community behind anti-racist values, it is unlikely that the majority of Montana is going to get behind armed neo-Nazis attacking Jews and Spencer’s insane bid for Washington. For anti-racists that want to support, it would be good to send money and make contact with Love Lives Here and stay prepared to hear news if the march actually takes place, and you can join in the organizing of counter-protest events.

 

In a master move, Love Lives Here is doing a fundraiser where you can donate a certain amount for every minute that the Nazis protest, so the longer they are there, the more money anti-hate groups will make.  You can commit to donate here.

Alternative Right, Anti-Fascism, anti-semitism, Militia Movement, National Anarchism, Scientific Racism, Third Positionism, White Nationalism

The Complete Anti-Fascist Reading List

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The term “fascism” has been thrown around left circles for decades as a proxy for authoritarianism, racism, or both. This inability to properly define and understand how fascist movements erupt and grow has created a deficit in organizing, and as we head into a Trump presidential administration and the massive growth of the Alt Right and white nationalism organizers across the left need the tools to break down these movements and how they work. There have been a lot of “reading lists” put out recently, so we thought we would compile one of our own that combines a whole number of threads that are important for understanding how fascism works. This includes detailed looks at the Alt Right, the more mainstream “Alt Lite,” the role of Neofolk and goth music, white nationalist organizing, the history of white nationalist violence, how the revival of scientific racism works, how anti-Semitism plays out, and all the other tentacles that make the intersectional beast of the new fascist movement.

This list of readings is far from complete, and this page is going to continue to be updated as we add new sections and flesh out the ones that are here. If you think there are some great ones that are missing, let us know, and also know that it is the writings, videos, and audio recordings below that make up a lot of the thinking that goes into this website. We have also angled the list below more in favor of newer articles as well as ones that are generally accessible(though there are a few academic ones dotted in there).

 

Alt Right

 

Alt Lite

 

Neofolk

 

White Nationalist Organizing

 

Anti-Semitism

 

Scientific Racism

 

Defining Fascism

 

Queerness and Fascism

 

Esoteric Fascism

 

National Anarchism

 

Third Position

 

White Nationalist Violence

 

Conspiracy Theory

 

Militia Movement

 

Donald Trump and White Nationalism

 

Anti-Fascist Organizing

Academic Racism, Anti-Fascism, anti-semitism, Donald Trump, Music, Neo-Paganism, Third Positionism

The National Policy Institute is Holding The Largest White Nationalist Conference of the Year November 19th

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On Saturday, November 20th, the Ronald Reagan building in Washington D.C. will host the largest white nationalist and Alt Right conference of the year. After a year and a half of Breitbart and the Donald Trump campaign mainstreaming their message of ethnic nationalism and minority blame, they have seen the kind of unprecedented growth that white nationalism hasn’t seen since segregation. The conference is coordinated by the National Policy Institute, the white bread named non-profit that props up The Radix Journal, Washington Summit Publishers, and the twice-yearly conferences that they hold. The project is all centered on the most prolific, and interviewed, white nationalist personalities of the year: Richard Spencer.

Spencer coined the term Alternative Right in 2010 and set out creating a movement, and string of publications, that were centered on a new “intellectual” brand fascism that brought together white nationalism with masculanism, Southern nationalism, reactionary conservatism, right libertarianism, paleoconservatism, ethnic paganism, and so on. That movement evolved into the snarky internet trolldom we have today after it was picked up by racist nerds on /pol/ and 4Chan/8Chan, and now we have a Trump supporting brand of meme-oriented fascists that have grown far beyond their well-vetted chat rooms.

On Saturday their largest conference will bring them together, with a special focus on younger Millennial “shitlords,” who get a discount on the hefty conference price. The conference is in a public facility that has been resistant to anti-fascist pressure, but as their profile grows it only becomes more vulnerable.

Spencer will be speaking, as always, as he has become a celebrity in their movement and is the one trying to bring an academic tone and fashionable appearance. He is able to do this as his parents still fund most of his luxurious living and he gets a heavy influx of money from William Regnery of the Regnery Publishing legacy.

He will be joined by various speakers popular in the Alt Right today, with a shift from conferences of the past away from fascist philosophers like those of the French New Right and towards internet YouTube magnets that gauge their political effectiveness by the number of “Likes” they get in internet back alleys.

Millennial Woes will be one of these, who has become popular as a YouTube commentator where he essentially holds Google Hangouts with the “Who’s who” of that week’s Alt Right fame. Being inspired mainly by the people at the Daily Shoah, he keeps the content reasonably low-bar, even though he tries to bring on the few PhDs that they have in their ranks.

The headliners, besides Spencer, will be Peter Brimelow and Kevin MacDonald. Brimelow is known for his time in the Beltway conservative journalism world, formerly writing for Forbes and on a crusade to bust the teacher’s unions. This led him to the belief that education outcomes were not the result of actual education state policies, but that some people were innately less able to pick up those smarts in the classroom. This lead to his landmark racialist book Alien Nation in 1995 that set him on his later trajectory, which was founding the racist immigration restrictionist website VDare. Over the last few years he has become increasingly radical in his white nationalism, speaking at places like American Renaissance and the H.L. Mencken Club.

Kevin MacDonald bridges the world of the Alt Right and the insurrectionary world of explicit neo-Nazis and KKK members (many of whom will also be attending NPI). MacDonald is best known for creating a series of books that act as the Das Kapital of anti-Semitism, creating a “Grand Theory” to explain all the disparate conspiracy theories about Jews. Believing that Judaism is a “Group Evolutionary Strategy” to compete with Gentiles for resources, he argues that Jews use their high IQs and eugenic behavior to create a parasitic super-race that dissolves “white racial consciousness” through their false ideologies of communism, capitalism Freudianism, Boasian anthropology, Feminism, and “Cultural Marxism.” He is a “race realist” that believes that black people have innately low IQs and is an avid white nationalist.

F. Roger Devlin bridges the “manosphere” with the Alt Right, being well known for trying to construct crudely realized science and anthropology to buff up his belief that white men are genetically superior creatures. He has latched himself onto Radix as a vessel and is hoping to slide in under its banner into the perception that he is an intellectual of the white nationalist movement. His image is not well known at this point, so this provides anti-fascists an opportunity to reveal him and his real name.

The pair from Red Ice Radio will be in the house as well, both Henrik and Lana. They have become the defining Alt Right media operation at this point, building up over the last ten years on a subscription model to doing regular podcasts and video broadcasts. Their content is a mix of bizarre conspiracy theories, embarrassing occult ramblings, attempts at Fedora faux-intellectualism, and “alt health” ideas like that Vaccines were invented by Jews to sterilize gentiles.

Matthew Tait will bring in a foreign nationalist perspective, as he has been a voice in various nationalist parties in Britain, such as the now-defunct British Nationalist Party. He vocally jumped behind the UK Independence Party and its Brexit plan, one that Richard Spencer has been highly critical of. He will likely be there to discuss the recent Brexit vote, which is being called the British equivalent of the Donald Trump election.

One thing that Spencer has been avid about is the building of a “meta-politic,” one that develops a right wing culture, mindset, and identity before it even seeks out political goals. In this way he has set out, mostly unsuccessfully, to make Radix a cultural magnate for the Alt Right. In this way he is including live music at his conferences from here on out, in the past hosting half of the neofolk band Changes. This year he will have neofolk acts Xurious and Upward Path, both of which have been well known for their fascination with racialist Odinism and various nationalist European movements.

What most the press is likely to focus on, besides Spencer’s glee at Trump’s victory, is that in their pre-event they will be hosting a “talk” by reality-celebrity Tila Tequila. Since she faded from television programming, she has made headlines for using her website as a platform for Holocaust Denial, virulent anti-Semitism, anti-black racism, and various fascist allegiances. She recently gained headlines for openly denying that the world was round, a claim that seems to have been neither a joke nor a satire. This is the first non-white speaker at an NPI gathering (she is half Asian), which many white nationalists have criticized, especially after a story in Mother Jones revealed that Spencer had romantic relationships with women of Asian descent.

The conference is being held on Saturday from 10am -11pm, with music and drinks in the evening. The night before, Friday, there will be a private event for conference attendees that has not been made public, as well as a brunch for the Sunday morning following the main conference. Spencer hopes to build camaraderie amongst the fascists and help to build networks that can help with on-the-ground organizing.

The One People’s Project has continued their years of incredible work by joining with the DC Anti-Fascist Coalition and Smash Racism DC and organizing the counter-demonstration for NPI. The OPP has been identifying and challenging Alt Right fascists for years, and they will also be photographing conference attendants as they enter the building so that they can be identified.

 

The action will be held at the Ronald Reagan building from 12:30-3:30, show up early if you can.

 

You can RSVP to the event on Facebook HERE.

 

Location Information:

 

Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center

1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, D.C.

 

12:30-3:30

 

You can also contact the Ronald Reagan Building administration to let them know what you think about them hosting a white nationalist conference.

 

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