fascism is an arresting word
What happens for you emotionally when you hear the word fascism? As an experiment, say the word out loud right now. I invite you to notice your body and the sensations, currents, memories, and emotional energy coming up for you.
consider the limited frames for addressing fascism
What is the story you tell about fascism? Where have you learned how fascism is stopped? Has it been through a multi-million dollar film industry that frames the American military as the hero that saves democracy and freedom? Does that story actually align with the reality we know to be true about how war is often a cover for rich men’s business interests, masquerading as national security? Do you feel free right now?
These are important questions to ask yourself because people always tell stories for a reason, and the films and stories we see that cut across popular culture and popular literature, lionize the military as the solution to unsafety and the defenders of our freedoms. It’s not just that our police are often used to protect property and that our military are often used to destabilize other countries, under the auspices of “national security,” when what they’re actually doing is extracting resources through force. This is why it’s important for you to question of whose safety and freedom are involved in these scenarios.
Related, it is these same millionaires and billionaires, who experience accountability as “unsafety,” that fund the arts the media we consume every day, so of course they are going sell you a story about that taking down fascism requires the military. Why? Because what they don’t want you to know is how fascism is toppled by every day people who remove the fascists’ pillars of support. Guns and money are weak weapons, which is why the film industry and popular culture have done everything to make you believe that guns and wealth are the pinnacles of power.
People who hoard power want you confused about your own power. They don’t want you to know how everyday people, across centuries, have assembled to remove domestic abusers. It’s always been regular people who take down fascists. Not military. Not law enforcement. Not courts. Regular-ass people.
There is also a reason why the United States produced so much material about the Third Reich and other fascist regimes in the first place— and this body of material has little to do with avoiding the harms of fascism. It was about glorifying military strength.
what an anti-fascist education might look like
If this country really meant “never again,” anti-discrimination would be a cornerstone of our democracy, following the second world war. We would have made reparations to First Nations and Black Americans who experienced genocide and chattel slavery. If our country and its media-culture cared about upending fascism, we would have a robust public education around how power is hoarded and how every day people can use their collective capacities to topple them.
The fact that we don’t have this information is very much on purpose.
If you listen to historian Heather Cox Richardson, she often talks about the rich robber barons who throughout the course of United States history have done everything they could to make sure that every day people did not get equal access to the ballot box, so that the will of the people might be overturned in the courts and through policy loopholes. Fascists do not win through the superiority of their moves, but simply because they’re cheating. I mention HCR to amplify that fascism has always been here in the United States. Indeed, as cultural rhetorician, I am also not unaware that Adolf Hitler looked to the United States as his model for establishing racial apartheid and genocidal systems of exclusion, erasure and terror.
I mention all of this to tell you that the stories that you have been told about fascism and how it might be stopped are not only incorrect, but that you have been purposefully mis-educated so that you would have no few ready tools to understand how stand up to fascism. There are a trove of resources from the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, Strategic Nonviolence Academy, Choose Democracy, Beloved Communities Network, Highlander Center, James & Grace Lee Boggs Center, Southerners on New Ground, and Poor People’s Campaign— all organizations practiced in mentoring neighbors to challenge abusive power systems.
I recommend taking the vulnerable risk to reach out to one of these resources and ask how you might get training to help grow resistance to fascism in your neighborhood. As we have seen, over and over again, neighborhoods who organize are neighborhoods where fascism can’t find a foothold. These organizations will provide you with the information that you need to think strategically and expansively about how to develop a plan forward.
you already have the tools to stop fascism
At the same time, I also want you to understand: You already have the tools available to you, right now, to stop fascism. Because fascism is simply domestic abuse at scale. If you are unfamiliar with this topic, I recommend checking out the Wheel of Power and Control to understand how abusers cause harm.
You can stand up to domestic abusers. The solution to domestic abuse may be effortful but it is also simple:
* remove abusers’ ability to target your vulnerable neighbors
* give to each other everything abusers are trying to take from you.
your neighbors are doing anti-fascist work: join them
Many of your neighbors are already doing their part to stand up to domestic abusers. All you have to do is figure out where they are and join them.
Consider this impartial list of everyday heroes who are fighting back domestic abusers by finding their lane (of time, talent, skills, and resources) and doing their small part:
* There are neighbors who are developing dispersed food, pantries, and funding their local food, pantries, and delivery systems.
* There are people who are teaching their neighbors how to hunt and forage and raise chickens and rabbits.
* People are teaching their neighbors how to dry, preserve, and can food.
* There are neighbors who are building time banks, so that people can exchange goods through a currency that does not involve capitalism but involves our time.
* There are people who are creating containers for people to experience emotion as a collective and have a safe place to grieve.
* There are people who are creating spaces to create public art and joyful celebrations.
* There are people who are praying and singing and dancing and wearing silly costumes to call attention to their vulnerable neighbors who have been stolen.
* There are people who are documenting the abuses of our neighbors.
* There are neighbors who are teaching people how to mend, reuse, repair, share, and crowdsource so we are less beholden to our corporate overlords.
* There are neighbors who are teaching “community night schools” that help adults learn how to organize, while their children (in another room) are learning inclusive curricula and activities not included in fascist-aligned state-sanctioned educational models.
* There are coalitions of churches, synagogues, mosques creating public inter-faith ceremonies so that people of faith might stand up and bear witness to the cruelty of this moment and induce hope and moral courage in bystanders.
* There are people who are opening neighborhood tech clubs that wipe Apple and Microsoft operating systems complicit in government surveillance) from people’s phones and laptops and replacing it with more secure, open-source Linux programs.
* There are artists who are creating zines about how to protect different vulnerable communities.
* There are musicians who are creating protest songs.
* There are artists who are creating public murals.
* There are graphic designers creating art that exposes regime propaganda and wheat-pasting posters around their towns.
* There are individuals engaged in creative protests that the target corporations who are supporting this regime.
* There are people who are coaching their neighbors in how to divest from vulture capitalism and, instead, direct money toward local pro-democracy businesses.
* There are people who are developing roommate-onboarding plans to make sure that none of their neighbors become homeless.
* There are people who are creating spaces for conversation and play as a way to rebuild the fabric of their communities.
* There are neighbors who are working with domestic abuse survivor networks to create underground railroads to hide, obscure, and relocate targets of the regime.
* There are public educators using their skills to teach neighbors how to organize against fascism— through anti-fascist book clubs and community-organizing night schools.
* There are neighbors who are learning ham radio and creating mesh networks in their neighborhoods to communicate should traditional communication lines be downed.
* There are neighbors who are working with the League of Women Voters and other interested community groups to create a trackable paper trail of people’s ballots and educating others about how recounts happen.
* There are young people who are running for office on platforms focused on affordability and inclusion for all.
* There are grandparents and people with disabilities who are babysitting the children of community organizers.
* There are elders who are putting on fluorescent, vests, and whistles, and carrying stop signs to become “cross guards” in their neighborhood, increasing a sense of community safety and connection.
* There are performers of all kinds who are offering free concerts, theater events, dance performances as a way to offer their neighbors encouragement.
* There are neighbors who are decorating their houses with pro-democracy winter lights displays.
* There are neighbors who are caroling in their neighborhoods, singing songs of peace and democracy, door to door, to inspire hope in their neighbors.
* There are groups of neighbors, including Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, and other youth groups, who are checking in on their vulnerable neighbors and making sure that they have meals, assistance, and social connection.
* There are neighbors who are teaching their community members about sustainable, small gardening and neighborhood perma-culture.
* There neighbors who are using what is left of our legal system to slow down and document the abuse we are seeing.
* There are some politicians of integrity who are challenging entrenched, corrupt politicians enabling this descent into brutality.
* There are children who are writing letters to their mayors, governors, and congressman, asking them to intervene to help our neighbors and save our democracy.
* There are school children who are taking part in watch-groups to protect their peers from being abducted by ICE.
* There are college student reporters who have bucked institutions of higher ed trying to censor them by creating their own independent newspapers.
* There are coalitions of neighborhood restaurants who work with neighbors to distribute leftover food.
* Some heroes are hiding neighbors who have been targeted by the regime.
* There are pastors who visit local precincts and hold public services outside on the message of loving and protecting one’s neighbors.
* There are cultural figures—from actors and musicians and athletes and writers— who are using their considerable talents, not only to speak out, but to donate substantial sums of their money to create and fund local pro-democracy, resistance groups in their own neighborhoods and home towns.
* There are people teaching free self-defense classes to women and other vulnerable groups.
* There are tenant rights groups preparing for rent strikes.
* There are writers and teachers, who are organizing to resist the erasure of marginalized voices in their workplaces.
* There are some members of the police, military, and intelligence, who are documenting and leaking evidence of crimes so that we might be able to reclaim our democracy.
* There are neighborhood blocks that have created safety plans and drills to make it as difficult as possible for their communities to be raided by abductors.
* There are doctors, nurses, doulas, paramedics, veterinarians, and healers of all kinds who are opening up free neighborhood services so that their neighbors will still receive medical care outside of the “insurance industrial complex” and the intentional gutting of the ACA.
* There are people who are creating community events to give their community a space to express not only what worries them about the situation that they’re in, but also what we want from the future of our democracy.
* There are guilds of lawyers and policy makers drafting a new constitution that enshrines the rights of everyday people and the rights of our planet.
* There are independent journalists working tirelessly to report on the news captured corporate media refuses to address.
* There are parents and their kids, dressing up as super heroes, and creating children’s marches for democracy in their own neighborhoods.
* There are people posting flyers around their neighborhoods about upcoming community organizing events.
* There are librarians in red states creating underground lending libraries for banned books.
* There are collectives of neighbors with home-building and repair skills who are leading volunteer repair efforts, now that FEMA’s mission has become abused and abandoned.
* There are people in every neighborhood developing plans for mass noncooperation, should the regime invoke the Insurrection Act or attempt to declare martial law.
* There are underground collectives ensuring access to reproductive care and gender-affirming care, in spite of regime backlash.
In short, there are people who are stepping forward and using their skills, whatever they are to reclaim our democracy and to stand up to domestic abusers. These people are just like you: regular folks who won’t abide people abusing their neighbors. They’re finding where they fit and plugging themselves in and, in the process, they’re finding a sense of courage and connection they wouldn’t have otherwise found.
So, to recap: There’s no need to use the “f-word.” Call it what it is: domestic abuse. That reframing snaps us out of a freeze state and helps us tap into our our agency and solidarity.
how will you stand up to domestic abusers?
I’d love to hear from you in the comments about how you plan to get involved to stand up against the domestic abusers who are attempting to tear apart our democracy.
